Metal Gear Tomb Raider: Pariahs
by Jack.Plain
Summary: In 2006, an anti-Metal Gear organisation is founded by six individuals who would change the course of history. And in doing so, they would be cast out of the world around them. [][][][] Character-driven drama; not melodrama. TR Canon is utilised variously. Updates Tuesday & Friday. Feedback enjoyed.
1. CHAPTER I

I'm writing this under some duress. I think that's the best place to start.

When I first met SS, I hadn't read Ms. Romanenko's book. The UK release of the (fictional, I am obliged to say by my publishers) book had been stymied with obnoxious business complications I'm not privy to. For those unfamiliar, it entails SS's excursion to an Alaskan base, a politically-destabalising weapon, and more of SS's past that I'm sure he'd care to detail. That was in 2005. But I met him in 2006, after a short rendezvous with a few of his associates, and at a place I had not expected to make any sort of business dealings.

SS has proven, in the years since, to be one of the strongest, most intelligent men I've ever met. One of the few people who's ever reminded me of my father, with a presence that made a room, _any_ room, gravitate towards him, and with no degree of discomfort with that fact.

I wish I knew that everything was okay. But I don't, and the purpose of this document isn't really scholarly, as my writings have traditionally been. There is remarkably little to be gleaned of an archaelogical bent in it.

My name is Lara Croft, and I sincerely hope this is not his last Testament.

I miss him very, very much.

-

There was a groping of a completely disinteresting manner at her tit.

The blonde was fumbling, and tiresomely boorish. He was a bit of a ponce, truth be told, and not very bright. She thought a sort of roll about with him might rekindle something, that she was jumping to conclusions, but after he began that awful dirty talk, she began to think better of it.

"Come on, then, off with these." Roaming hands bungled behind her back, sleuthing for a clasp that would undo her gown. She began to push his hands away.

"No, actually, I'd rather we return to-"

"It's alright, just a little snog-"

"Excuse me?" She laughed, snorted a moment in a fashion completely unladylike, then brushed a loose strand out of her hair out of her face. "That's quite enough. I'm afraid I've made a mistake."

"What? Lara, I-" And he backed off, looking genuinely surprised. That was the shame of it. That he could be interesting and fun, but so often was too, too... something. It must have been the asti spumante.

"I'm sorry, I think we should return to the ball now. This is just all a bit much, and I think I must still be jetlagged or something." When Francis opened his mouth to speak, so Lara too did to continue, if only to make sure of leaving him absolutely no chance to protest. "Bit of wine, bit of adventure, and I'm scrambled. Sorry about this. Got to be going, thank you though." She checked her gown with her hands. All zippers, earings, buttons intact. "Maybe we can talk a bit later?" Handbag was yanked free from his beneath his coat. She could hear the chatter of beyond the guest bedroom, down the hall. "Try the Marionberry Mascarpone cake, yes? Fantastic stuff. Winston's own." And she closed the door behind her.

"Phew."

Lara stood in a hall of the visitor's wing of her estate, hall lined with a dozen or so guest bedrooms with (mostly) open doors leading to plush, warmly-lit rooms. From the main ballroom, laughter pattered and champagne flutes tinkled and voices tumbled over one another in a cascade of good will. She felt relieved, and began for an adjacently vacant room to use their water closet when she realized she'd left her heels. She began to laugh, realized the it might appear unseemly, and stifled it. She tittered all the way back to the throng of people.

Overhead the cacophonous room were chandeliers ornate with light and gold, and bathed each face and facet of glass. Every broach and every cufflink sparkled under their attention. Candelabras mounted on columns giving the room its warm colouring glittered in brass highlights. A velvet banner with her family crest hung off the central wall, and she felt welcomed and overjoyed at the turnout.

People chattered amongst each other in tuxedos and evening gowns, waitstaff darting about. Dinner had ended only half an hour earlier and the gathering had not dimmed in the least. Her publishers had already given their speech, her butler already welcomed her back to the UK to great applause, and now everyone had adjourned to their current affair: examining the artifacts she had brought back from South Africa. Many of them had none of the characteristics associated with the region, and although she had been excited for the adventure, the exploration, the solitude, she also felt vaguely disappointed that it had concluded.

She also felt a clawing at a more... base urge. The time away was always exciting, but once back in her native land, she felt a need for something more human that digging about ancient stone and clay. Francis might have been able to-

"Excuse me? Miss Croft?"

"Mm?" Lara came about and glanced behind her, then turned to face the gentleman.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you. I just wanted to thank you for inviting me."

"Oh, you're welcome of course. I don't think I could possibly have done without you." She smiled broadly, trying to mask her inquisitive examination of him. Barest hint of stubble, clear eyes, maybe twenty five, hundred and eighty centimetres perhaps. She couldn't tell. His glasses were wireframes, and looked new.

"You're not sure who I am, are you?" He looked amused. Good sign.

"Afraid not, I'm sorry. I can barely recall putting on my shoes, as you can see."

"I was invited by a partner of your publishers, at Eton. I was auditing a class there as an overseas student years ago." He pressed the glasses up his nose, and sipped at his champagne. The minor wrinkling of his nose did nothing to hide his unfamiliarity with white wines.

"You went to Eton? Really?"

"MIT, actually. They let me audit a few courses for a semester here as part of an exchange program. It helped I, uh, have family here." Before Lara could relieve herself of the man's company, hopefully to go out to the gardens and allow some of the air to clear her head a bit, he continued. "Your father has quite the reputation there."

"My father?"

"Yeah. Even as an American, I was impressed. Everyone thinks very highly of him. One of the professors I spoke with was one of his classmates, so I heard a lot. When a friend mentioned some months ago you were publishing again and they needed a date, I couldn't resist."

"Thank you. It's nice hearing he's not forgotten in his students." She smiled more genuinely now, and extended one hand. "I never caught your name."

"Hal. Hal Danziger." Gently, he shook her hand. Strangely, Lara thought she smelled cigarettes on him briefly, but as soon as she recognized the smell, it was gone. "I have to admit, I actually wasn't sure I'd enjoy myself, but I went to school primarily for technology because anthropology scared me to death.

This is has been really educational."

Lara stole a flute off a passing tray, nodding thanks and continuing. "You can't mean that. A lot of it's boring to most. I'm flattered, but-"

"Habari yako?"

Lara shrugged. "Nzuri. But there's so few people who- wait." She looked at him, bemused and interested. "You speak swahili?"

"Sure. I picked up a few bits and pieces off the net and from a friend I worked with last year, and obviously I'm not fluent, but yeah. This stuff is really interesting." His tic of pressing his glasses up the ridge of his nose began to appear ritualised. "I've also, ah, got a bit more of a personal motive for attending. I hope you're not offended."

From one end of the room, a few men laughed uproariously, catching both of their attention, and she replied after they had quieted. "No, it's quite alright."

Hal raised an eyebrow and looked slightly ill-at-ease. "I came here to see if I could persuade you into hearing out a little bit of a business venture?" Before Lara could object: "I know this isn't the right setting for that sorta thing, but I just wanted to know if you'd hear us out. It's a bit of a pet project, but we're not a business, and we don't need..." He struggled for a moment for polite terminology. "Financial assistance? We just want a little of your thoughts is all. "

"Well, my schedule's free for the forseeable future, and I'd much rather spend my time having a bit of lunch with you than watching my book get trashed by Le Monde, so how is 'maybe'?"

"Better than nothing." And Hal's face lit up. Somehow, it made Lara feel good to see the younger man appear a bit more at peace with himself.

"Do you mind if I inquire about this project's name?"

He paused, and as if making it up on the spot, smiled a beam of elation. "Philanthropy."


	2. CHAPTER II

Lara closed the door gently behind her. Sounds of the cleanup staff had drizzled down into a quiet group of shufflings, tapping wingtips, glasses being moved, and the banquet's refuse being polished away into memory. She could hear their measured, dutiful motions through the crack beneath the oak door. Most of the guests had retreated to valeted vehicles brought forth after the slow ease of the event, others had retired to guest bedrooms, others still driven home by staff. The sound of pattering rain from high windows left cracked had filled their vacancy with pattering sighs.

It was this sound that Lara relished as she heard the door click closed. The rain swept itself along the grounds in great washing arches of spring rain, edging out the remains of winter. It reminded her of the moisture between her legs, a dull cloying feeling that had maintained itself throughout much of the night. Her hands went to her navel, warming them between either leg for just a moment.

"Thinking of me?"

Francis' voice wafted from the corner of the room. An antique wing chair sat in one corner of her bedroom, and he lounged in it without any sign of trespass. Which he was.

Lara tried successfully not to jump out of her skin. "Good heavens, don't do that. I'm exhausted, I hardly expected you to, to-"

"Stalk you?" He stood up. Broad shoulders. Slightly rounded chin, reflections of ghost light from the window making him seem vividly translucent, somehow. She felt wispy from the alcohol. "I just wanted to try again."

"I have no doubt of that." She tossed the heels she'd retrieved from the guest bedroom on the floor.

"And I suppose you want something from me?"

"Not exactly." He began to try and close the gap between them in the darkened room. There was a draft from the window left ajar in the other room, chilling her skin. Maybe it was just him. "I don't suppose you met anyone at the party?"

"No, just you. Don't you think I'd be with company right now if I did?" She recalled for a moment the words that had come out of her mouth and ruminated on how it made her sound. "Don't answer that.

Look, I've been up for twenty hours, I think this isn't the best time. "

"Four poster oak bed. Canopy and everything. Very alluring." No jacket, just a vest, cumberbund, trousers. Hair wet. So cocky. Francis had one hand on his hip and looked just as good as he imagined.

"Stop it."

"A lot of things we could do on it."

"Quite. -I- could god, you're terrible. " But she felt her self restraint give way to something more base, and that urge bubbled up again. Francis was not the brightest man on earth. His attempts to be Claus von Bülow were tragically misplaced, ego overinflated by a designer haircut and competent genes. He was also her junior, by three years. But he was warm, and present, and she could smell the flesh of him, like incense and orchards and pine.

She felt foolish when it dawned on her he'd slowly been closing the gap between them.

"Come on. Old times sake?"

The ruins had been cool and smeared with dirt. Every sense had seemed tenderised after the trip. Her first shower in over a week had been almost agonising in its tantalisation. And for weeks, she had felt that urge pulse larger.

Oh, to hell with it.

After the shock had subsided, Lara let herself fall back on her heels, then on her bottom. The ground was colder than she realized, and her panties felt unpleasantly sticky. Her knees ached. Her jaw felt like a broken hinge and her legs vaguely like jelly. She felt a physical satisfaction that unnerved her in its transitory elusiveness, and an undesirable mounting of exhaustion . Climbing onto the bed next to Francis, Lara paid no mind when he wrapped his arms around her, pushed his chest to her back. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt but not understood the mild disdain that had formed. But it was what the body required, and she would sate it again, sometime.

She thought, briefly, of the party. Of that Hal character. Oddly, she hoped it wouldn't be raining when they had lunch. Outside, the rain battered the flume and the windows and the brick and cobblestone arches of her home. It would be eons before it would let up.

And sleep, mercifully, took no time at all.


	3. CHAPTER III

_Author's Note: This chapter was reedited once, for spelling, continuity, and minor additional material._

The rest of the week was spent mired in boredom, a series of tedious chores that needed tending to, with few intervals between. First was a run with the press, casual and authoritative, regarding her adventures. Was it difficult being a woman in her field, was she rebelling, was she repressing, did she fancy ever being in a biopic, did she regard other studies as being too costly, too stuffy, too casual, did she enjoy any imitators, did she listen to praise detraction retraction or slander. The day after that was an argument with the typesetter, since she wanted a slightly larger font and gliclee imprint for the deluxe edition that would raise the cost of the book, so she argued instead for a lessened quantity that would serve everybody's purpose. Later still that week was a fly-by-night meeting in London with a board of individuals wherein she had to argue the methods of a paper published two years ago, having to defend the tactics used to wrest objects from artifact poachers.

Then there was the charity ball.

The morning after her return, and her night with Francis, she had spent what little free time she had reflecting on their intimacy, if it could be called that. There was a residual sensation like guilt somewhere floating about her thoughts that made her feel like she'd tossed back a dirty cocktail, a gutburn that lingered in the caverns of her ribcage like loathing. It had been brief and filthy, satisfying like aniseed mingling incense. Her thoughts made her feel preteen and petty, exacerbated by her surroundings of top shelf bourgeoisie. There were bright sparklings and clinking bourgeois and she felt so out of place, she left early, tired with formality and bored by her immaturity.

Francis had not filled something, but left instead only knowledge instead that there was a space.

On Saturday, meeting Mr. "Danziger," she realised that maybe she'd lucked into just what she might need.

"I'll have black pinto on wheat, lightly buttered, please. Oh, and chinese green tea with no cream, no sugar, thank you. Hal?" Lara handed back her menu.

"Uhm, a croisant and a scone, please. Coffee, lots of sugar and milk. Nastasha?" He gave back the menu and began cleaning his hornrimmed glasses.

"Black coffee, straight, an ashtray, and some eggs, please, scrambled. Thank you." Nastasha produced a pack of cigarettes and gave their menu to the waiter.

Lara played lightly with the rose at the middle of the wrought iron table. They were the only people at the cafe's terrace, and dawn was a lovely throat beyond the cobbles and the looming brick edifices surrounding them. They were on the outskirts of a downtown street, closer to low-rent flats and the river than to anything remotely urbane. If they had been in the 1910's, almost nothing would have looked amiss. There were the beginnings of passersby and bicyclists moving about, but they had most of the early morning, and the entirety of the outdoor dining, to themselves.

"Lovely venue, by the way. Thank you both for the invitation. I take it you two have already spoken, though." Ms. Romanenko had begun her second cigarette of the morning. A rail-thin blonde on the cusp of forty with no interest in formality and a light czech accent. Lara liked her as soon as they'd introduced themselves, after the older woman had extended her hand and gripped Lara's firmly, like a colleague.

Hal placed his glasses back on the ridge of his nose. "Yes, and no."

"I'm afraid I know only that there was a proposition to be made?"

"Well, yes, and no." Hal pressed his glasses back up, the tic's resurgence. "We had a few questions for you, actually, and after that we can proceed."

"Sure, I'm not opposed to that much at least."

Nastasha, cigarette planted in the corner of her mouth and arm crooked over the table's corner, leaned forward. "Are you opposed to something a bit less... public than your more recent activities?"

"Uh? I'm not sure I understand." Lara wrinkled her nose and raised an eyebrow. The waiter came back, caraffe with water and three glasses. After the awkward pause, Hal clasped his hands and proceeded.

"What we're asking, and I guess this'll make this breakfast a lot shorter depending on your answer, is you operate strictly legally?"

Lara paused. Considered. "I suppose that depends."

Nastasha and Hal exchanged brief, furtive smiles. It was Nastasha who let out a small laugh. "Harasho. A fine answer, miss. I would trust nothing less. I'm afraid we're being rather secretive-"

"My, I'll say."

"-but I hope you'll trust Mr. Danziger and myself in that it's all necessary. Our work is going to be public very soon, and with involvement in the United Nations not long after.""United Nations? I'm sorry, I'm afraid I certainly must have missed a beat. Are the two of you from the American government?"

"No." Both in unison.

Lara was becoming slightly annoyed by this odd doublespeak. "Look, I'm not much of a diplomat, so I'm going to have to insist that we dispense with the lot of this and get straight to things as they are, if that's alright with both of you?"

There was another prolonged pause and Lara was certain they were silently weighing their options. It was Hal who figuratively stepped forward first.

"We need an investor, and an agent. We're activists. Of a sort." Before Lara could quip; "or we will be. And not for the environment, or against governments, or technology. We're not fighting nations or wars or politicians." He took a deep breath, looked at his hands, lingering there. For a moment, Lara saw guilt. "We're fighting holocaust.""Holocaust?""Of a nuclear scale. We have good reason to believe there's going to be an illegal proliferation of a dangerous nuclear war device that's been unprecedented. And almost nobody knows it's going to happen, and if something isn't done..." Hal looked to the table.

Their food arrived. It was the only piece of sound any of them made, the adjustments of ceramic and silverware.

Lara gently set a hand on Hal's arm. The sleep was warm to the touch in the chilled air. "I'm afraid I'm not sure I can help either of you without this being a very frank sort of discussion, but if it's any consolation, you've got my full attention."

Nastasha stirred her coffee. "Mm. What Hal is trying to say is what we're doing is nothing short of espionage of the highest sort. And although we'll be on the books, it's not legal, strictly speaking."

"This... weapon? Is it an agent of some sort, or release system?"

Nastasha's gaze seemed to investigate Lara in very short order before deciding in her favor. The Czechan snubbed out her cigarette, and the act's malice did not seem imaginary. "No. This is a mobile nuclear platform. Unlike launch sites or flying vehicles, it is a bipedal 50-foot-tall combat-capable tank with surface-piercing nuclear armament and designed for mass production. It has equal chance of decimating infantry on war fronts as well as national stability.

In short, it's a superweapon unlike anything else. And it has to be stopped."

A kingfisher glided to the cobbles nearby, sweeping in silence between them. It pecked the ground, mocked them with its nonchalance.

Flew off.

Nastasha continued. "Its development has a... troubled history, dating back to the seventies. Working prototypes have reached critical stages in development at various times only to be destroyed, lost, sabotaged, dismantled, or otherwise made inoperable. But a year ago, its creation came to a head, with an American weapons manufacturer backing its creation and beginning live tests. If not for a last-minute intervention, it might already be seeing mass production."

"Manufactured by whom?"

Hal took over. "ArmsTech, a major defense contractor. Who and what they are seems vaguely irrelevant, save for that they've been involved in a lot of dirt that I don't care to think about. Your, uh, toast is getting cold."

"Oh, thank you." Lara took a bite and hardly finished before asking, "Does this weapon, this thing, have a name?"

Lara did not relish the silence that hung again, like a noose.

"Metal Gear," Hal said.

The rest of the morning was spent talking about the specifics of the weapon, and of their involvement in understanding it. Most of it had been brush strokes, as Nastasha had produced from a small briefcase a typed manuscript that had been passed over the table. Lara had been told it detailed a military operation freeing an island from terrorists, of which they had been participants. Other questions couldn't be answered by the manuscript, Lara was sure, so after they had gathered most of the heavy lifting out of the way, she began probing for logistics more tangible.

"This is... fascinating. Scary, awful, but fascinating. So what's next? What are you two-"

"Four.""I'm sorry?"

Hal produced three photographs from a small manilla envelope Nastasha had set on the table. The first two were of a middle aged man in frontal and profile photograph, the second frontal headshot of an asian woman in her early twenties, and Lara sulked at the last photo: its face was down and looked only blank to the other three. "There's four of us. Well, I suppose three is closer to the truth. One can't really take a public stance." Hal tapped the middle aged man. "He was involved in a commanding position at the incident last year. He's still with the government, too, so he's not freelance like us."

"Ah, I see. Working from the inside, eh?" Lara had polished off her toast. They had been talking for hours, and her view of the situation was only now coming to something resembling shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure that's it, but it can't be far off. There's also a technical analyst, but she's only twenty, so she can't contribute much outside of trying to help advise us." He slid over the photo of the young woman.

Lara picked it up, scanning the glossy paper in the warm light wafting between stone buildings. "She's pretty. But... advise? You mean with... well, with sabotage?" The two of them grew quiet. "I mean, that's what's being put on the table here, isn't it? I can't imagine bad publicity alone will be enough to make this go away."

Hal nodded. "I guess we're just jittery about saying it aloud. Yeah, I suppose that's as good a phrase as any. Her name's Mei Ling. She with the US Solder Systems Center. The officer I was talking about was Roy Campbell. You'll hear about him in there, too." Hal gestured at the thick sheaf of paper.

"I've no doubt. I haven't asked either of your stakes in this."

Nastasha had worked herself down to half a pack. Her tenth cigarette smelled just as unpleasant as her first. "I participated in the incident, under request from the American Defense Intelligence Agency. I, mm, also have a bit of a personal vendetta against nuclear weapons."

"I don't blame you. Awful bloody things. And you, Hal?"

Nastasha leaned back and closed her eyes. Hal, for his part, could not meet Lara's. For the second time, Lara reached out to him, placing her palm on his sleeve. "Hal? Are you alright?"

"I... I was chief operations engineer and project leader." He let out a long sigh, bit one lip, and moved in his chair with the discomfort. When he removed his arm from beneath Lara's hand, she pretended not to take notice of his awkwardness. "I had been working for ArmsTech since college, more or less. They paid full tuition and gave me as much or as little wriggle room as I wanted. I had no idea, if you can believe it, that it wasn't for defense; so much of TMD tech is embroiled in the same umbrella. And it's not like I didn't help stop it."

Lara watched Hal squirm under accusations she hadn't lobbed, and let the subject pass. "I see. That's four of you, and the fifth?"

From Nastasha's lips, long billows of smoke exhaled. "The founder of this idea, you mean?"

"Founder?" She turned to Nastasha. "Then this wasn't Hal's idea."

Nastasha nodded. "Yes. Philanthropy, as an idea, is not. He sought us out one by one, Hal first. Hal might have brought your name up to him, but it was his go ahead to attempt to recruit you. " She hesitated, unsure of how much to divulge.

"I owe him my life," Hal said.

Nastasha nodded. "Yes. He destroyed Metal Gear itself singlehandedly."

"You're kidding." Lara felt her heart take a small leap. Her throat tightened. "Didn't you say it was almost fifty meters high?"

"Mhmm." She said it like it was nothing.

"Earlier, when you said you needed another..." Lara dug for the term. "'Agent.' He's the other one, isn't he?"

Another nod."He's the one they sent in alone on the island to rescue its hostages and stop the uprising."

Nastasha handed the last photo to Lara. She flipped it.

On its front was a man maybe as much as ten years older than herself. Clean shaven, stern, short hair. The photo was dated as being a year old. There was no text save where his eyes had been: There was only a long black bar that read "DO NO DISTRIBUTE: U.S.D.O.D.," and a name in the lower right hand corner that she spoke aloud.

"Solid Snake."


	4. CHAPTER IV

_Author's Note: The previous chapter has been edited for small continuity errors, with some minor material added._

When Lara went home, noon had come and gone, and she had spent most of the afternoon reading the manuscript left to her from her two dining companions. She hadn't expected Nastasha had written it entirely on her own, or in the first person, but there was a frankness to its style Lara liked, at least in as much as she could like a nonfiction account. It had started innocuously, with a dedication to Nastasha's former husband. They had agreed it'd be best to reapproach the subject after she had ingested the events authored and then reached a conclusion afterwards. She spent hours after drifting in and out of the narrative, being jarred away by intrusive foot traffic or local colour before resigning herself for home.

Once back at the estate, she neglected food and inquiry in its favour, transfixed by Nastasha's account. terms became the dominant thought process. Liquid Snake Revolver Ocelot WMD's patricide REX nuclear surface-piercing Otacon death FOXHOUND launch Shadow Moses. It enthralled and horrified her. Hours evaporated.

When daylight had collapsed into nightfall, Lara turned the publication away in its last stretches for a stiff drink, an increasing rarity. Most often she found liquor to be all very similar. At this moment she did not feel particular about its flavour, and made herself a tall dry bourbon. She ruminated on Hal, or Otacon's, role in the events.

Lara took the drink out to her bedroom's balcony, decended the stone steps in bare feet, and let the cold wash over her. The sky was clear with vivid cerulean, stars like lit holes in a sheet of dark blue. Rains had floated in like waves over the past week. The weather only reminded her of the estrangement from herself, of Francis, and this was the first instance she felt that was preferable to ruminating on the manuscript. There was too much to take in. There was too little to grasp it with.

Once, along the Nile Delta and a few hours south of Cairo, she had been on an expedition with a friend, an archaeologist from the states of somewhat more traditional methods. It was winter, and the expedition was searching for artifacts from which deductions could be made. When the sun disappeared over the horizon, the weather was transformed and transformative, violent in its stoic cold. Lara spent most of her evenings giving acid baths to very fragile relics, but once had gotten lost and stranded just twenty minutes from their camp. She had been in a cavern since the early morning in what was otherwise a wasteland of sand, and spent the night desperately trying to keep alight a flame that kept her from freezing to death. She had felt desperate, and alone. Confidence that usually sustained her had been eroded by such a simple mistake as becoming turned around in an alien environment, and the night was long with doubt.

Until now, Lara had not felt merely solitary, which could be liberating, but isolated.

She thought too of this man, Snake, Nastasha detailed. He came off as icy, and sad, and imminently strong. Lara thought of the men in suits and embroiled in institutional dogma that surrounded institutions of higher learning and felt a pang of regret that everything seemed more mild.

Bubbling somewhere underneath a melancholy unlike her was also an excitement, and an anticipation radiating outwards.

When she returned inside and to the manuscript, she had finished her bourbon and felt significantly more lightheaded for it. It was another hour before she finished it, and she put the stack of paper down for only a minute before crossing the room to her phone. Lara dialed the number Otacon had scribbled on the last page. She watched wall-mounted candles flicker in her bedroom while waiting for the line to pick up. Lara got the machine instead.

"Hi, if you've got this number, I'll call you back when I get the chance. I'm probably not in the hotel right now, but I shouldn't be long. Thanks."

"Hal, it's Lara. I just finished "In the Darkness."" She paused, not sure where else to go from there. "I don't know what to think. It's... big. I have a hard time believing some of it, but-"

The other end of the line clicked. "Lara?"

"I wasn't sure I'd get you so late. How's things?"

"I'm fine, I can't sleep anyway. I'm still on US time and it's got me all-"

"Right, look, listen, I want in." Pregnant silence. "Hal?" When there was no reply: "Attendant?"

"No, I'm here. I'm, uh, just a little surprised."

"It's true. I can't believe something like this would have happened. Or that it has a precedent."

"Yeah, I guess Snake was involved in stuff like this twice before. I'm not real clear on the details, and-"

"I want to meet him."

"Uh, come again?"

"I want to meet him. This, mm, Solid Snake? He seems an odd bloke, but I want to meet him." And then, on the heels of that. "I have to."

"Well, sure. I figured."

"Tomorrow."

There was shuffling on the other side of the line, and a sound like knocking something to the floor. A click, more shuffling. "Lara, I'm really overjoyed that you're on board, but I don't know how we can do that. Nastasha had to fly back to California today, then she'll be in New York. I've got to be to New York by Monday, I couldn't get Snake here any sooner than the day I leave. You're going to have to be patient."

"Hal, patience I'm afraid is not a strong suit of mine, but if you insist. Is there any chance I can convince you to stay? I could cover airfare, if that's a concern."

Otacon laughed. "No, that's not it. We're going to be looking at headquarters in the city, and I have to draft a proposal to the United Nations and start building partnerships, get us on the books. We're officially a nuclear disarmament committee, so I have to be on-site for the application." He paused,

seeming to consider. "I suppose I can put it off a day or two. Snake has to come back with me anyway."

"Is that really what you call him?"

"Huh? Oh, Snake? Yeah. I guess I could call him by his real name, but it sounds weird. We tried Hal and Dave for a few phonecalls, but it didn't last long."

"And you, Mr. Danziger?"

Otacon laughed. "Oh, right. Sorry about that. We weren't sure what sort of person you were, so I thought that before we gave you "In the Darkness," I'd use my stepmom's maiden name. But you checked out, so I guess it's a moot point."

"'Checked out'?"

"Yeah. I...uh, sort of had you investigated."

"Well, I'm not fond of it, but I guess I expected it. I should say I think Hal Emmerich sounds much nicer than that, or Otacon even."

"Heh, thanks. I should get going, though, I've got some arrangements to make."

"Sure." Lara hesitated. "I'd like to meet this Meryl woman, too. You're all so young. She must be, what, twenty two now?"

"Huh? Oh. Meryl's, ah, not actually part of Philanthropy. She and Snake... It's a sore subject for him. You might want to wait."

"Oh, I didn't know. Hal, I'm terribly sorry."

Lara could practically hear Otacon blushing. "No, really, there's no trouble, it's just... she refused. Snake knows more about it than I do, though."

"No doubt." She looked at the clock. It was nearing midnight. "Hal, can I ask you something? One last thing?" On the wall, a candle dripped wax to the floor. "What's he like?" His name tasted strange spoken aloud. "Snake, I mean."

"He's... complicated? I don't know. Good at listening." Otacon thought for a moment. The light in Lara's room shimmered. "Snake's a good guy. I don't know if anybody else would have thought of all of this without him. When I saw him for the first time after Shadow Moses, he said the idea wasn't his, and I'm not sure I get it. He said it was his friend's."

"His friend?"

"Yeah. Someone named Frank. I don't really understand, but that's what he says. Why, are you nervous?"

"Mm? No, no, not at all." Lara bit her lip. "He just seems..."

"Big, somehow?"

"Yeah."

They said their goodbyes shortly after that, and Otacon had a final comment on the matter before bidding her goodnight.

"You get used to him."

Lara thought that very, very unlikely.

And she was right.


	5. CHAPTER V

Author's Note: Thanks to Major Mike Powell III for the big ups.

The mottled gunmetal sky clung malignantly over London for the next week. On Sunday, Lara's only day to herself, it cleared for an afternoon's worth, where she lounged in the gardens of her estate and reread Nastasha's book. She was out of view of the country road, hedges too high for any oversight, so she lazed about sifting from page to page, stretched out like a lizard on the verandah that sat on the lip of the topiary maze's guest house. When the rain began to threaten, she moved inside the small cottage, drifting from room to room, following the best light source before dusk.

The challenge, as she ingested it less as a narrative and more as a factual series of allegations (in the strictly legal sense), would be finding how to get it published, who she knew who'd take a look at it, who might be interested stateside, but her connections only stretched so far. Academic publishing was a far cry from what was being required, and that was even before the libel angle could be argued. She also had the performance of her own papers to attend to, which had been trashed in a review out of Surrey that had some weight to it, and might affect the reach of her influence. Even still, for Nastasha and Hal, there was little corroboration to be made, and the implications it threw around were damaging to a number of parties she was edging into. She pondered briefly giving Nastasha a ring in hopes of possibly discussing amending some of the claims hoisted, but knew it would do no good. Nastasha would inevitably refuse to change them, with good reason considering their aim, and even if names and events were altered, the nonfiction quality it represented would come to nothing and its publication would be only an effort in vanity. She began to feel the weight of what they were asking, but rather than feel its frustration, she felt mildly exhilarated by the challenge.

Around the evening hours, she decided to give it a rest, and retire the topic from her thoughts. She went back to the main house, showered, changed into evening wear, and returned to her bedroom with a decanter of ice water and her computer. The rest of the night was a small effort to try and validate, or even invalidate, any of the accusations they would be making in the coming months. Unsurprisingly, there was little to be gleaned from traditional methods, even still using net backchannels she had made from nebulous antique and artifact thieves over the past few years. There was only a brief story stateside about an Alaskan base being overrun by right-wing extremists who demanded penetentiary release of criminals before being captured again by a special forces unit, with not a lick of intrigue to it. She found conspiracies, of course, events that had nothing to do with a nuclear tank, or cloning, or ethically unsound. Oddball commentary and speculation involving aliens, a hollow earth theory, even supposed sightings of ghosts, but nothing resembling actual events.

Otacon she found easily enough, however. No picture, but a name, on the alumnus page of MIT for the early aughts. Double major. She was impressed. Likewise, Ms. Romanenko had a record on file as being part of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team.

Of Snake, there was nothing. Not a rumour, or a hint, or even theories.

She wondered, idly, if they had been this easy to verify, if not their participation then their existence, just how easy it would have been to investigate her. She thought quietly about the stupidity of letting the celebrity of her life and the public face her family had always vaguely cultivated.

The last service bell chimed from one corner of her room, signaling Winston would be turning in. She hardly noticed. Midnight snuck up in between keystrokes, and when she nodded off in front of the laptop, she was thinking of Hal, and of REX, and of publishers, and of Snake.

Curiously, of Snake.

"And I'd been reading about the Masai, at the time, about their ritualism and the odd periods of growth and reclusiveness they exhibited, like a surging entity. They were almost cellular, in their military precision, and even the tools they used were precise beyond that of competing tribes in the area, honed to such a point they resembled artistry of a very stoic kinda way. But you know, I'm sure you've read all that before. "

"Hal, I just wanted to know if you'd ever been to Africa."

Lara had picked up Otacon in a taxi from the city. She had called in advance, and Otacon had advised her to come incognito, odd a request as it was, if it was possible. She'd gotten a long-brim sonoma hat and sunglasses, dressed otherwise in active summerwear in hopes of appearing as an impromptu vacationer. They'd taxi'd out to the terminal and been idly chatting since.

There was a man approaching, broad shouldered, in the distance. He was cutting a swath through the crowded airport, suited, with a small electronic tchotke on one lapel. It was clear he was moving for the both of them.

"I think this gentleman means to interrupt you. Thank God." Lara stood. There was only the sound of babbling group conversation, of tellers at desks, of overhead intercoms buzzing names and chattering times, countries, gates and doors. There were lines of men and women shuffling through metal detectors and darting into corridors. They had been waiting two hours for Snake to show up, and although his plane had landed, he hadn't disembarked in any way they could find. Nor had they heard from him.

"I'm actually rather pleased that we should be meeting him now. I was thinking I might come back to the states with the both of you. It's been a long time since I've been to New York, and I rather liked it the last time." Lara stood when the man was within arm's length, and she extended her hand.

The man promptly ignored her, reached into his pocket, and handed Otacon a small phone with a touchscreen.

"'Scuse me. He's rather rude a lot, then?"

"This isn't Snake."

Otacon looked at it, at the man, at Lara, then back to the phone. He pushed his glasses up his nose. The man turned from Lara, and walked away, and in the process Lara saw the namebadge clipped onto his lapel. He was a concierge.

In a moment, the phone rung.

Otacon looked at Lara again, who shrugged, then handed it to her.

"Why me?"

He shrugged.

Lara scrunched up her nose, clicked it on. "Hullo?"

The other end of the phone was raspy, sounding hushed and hurried at once. And maybe slightly concerned. "Where's Otacon?"

"Are you..." She looked at Hal. "He? They? Him?"

"The both of you have to get out of here. They know we're here."

"What?"

"When we were landing, I heard one of the attendants. They know we're in the airport. Get out now. I'll meet up with you both soon." And the line went dead.

Lara handed the phone back, and Otacon held it up to his ear. "Hal, he's not there. I think there's some trouble. He said they know you both are at the airport."

"Oh, no." Otacon stood. "We've got to go."

"Go? What?" Lara chased after him as he moved towards an exit, slipping her sunglasses back on.

"Why is this a problem?"

"You read the whole thing we gave you, right? You know REX's dummy data, the disk with all of its launch information?" Otacon rolled his sleeve up, producing a small wrist-mounted keyboard made of rubber and plastic. It ran from his wrist to his elbow, and he began tapping away at it.

"Yeah."

"It went missing, and they think Snake has it," Otacon said. In the distance, Lara spotted men in uniforms approaching the both of them.

"That's bad, yes, I could see why that would be bad. Those men don't look very welcoming." Lara checked herself instinctually. No weapons. "Hal, I don't mean to alarm you, but could you give me a worse case scenario?"

"For me? Maybe jail until the end of time."

"And for Snake?"

"A firing squad."

Lara scanned over them as quickly as she could. They'd be within arm's distance in just a few seconds.

Two men, a handgun on each, but not quite terribly fit. They were airport security, and used more to escorting hooligans than the odd terrorist and suspected agent for England (or America's) downfall.

She steeled herself before realising Otacon had placed his hand on her lightly.

"Don't. We have to get out of here safely. Just... not here. Not yet." He answered a question she hadn't asked. "They're just police. If we make a fuss, game's over and we lose Snake. I've got a backup plan."

Lara kept walking. Just a moment now. "Hal, please."

"Wait." They got within grabbing distance. He tapped a single key on his wearable, and the lights above them hissed, whined, exploded in a sudden blasting sound of thousands of fluorescents supercharging and their tension filaments snapping. "Now, go!"

Lara felt no need, at least in the dark, to play nice. She grabbed the wrist of one officer and flipped him into the other by spinning his arm and following the rest of his body weight with it. Otacon was already ahead of her, burrowing himself deeper into the crowd. "Come on," he was shouting ahead of her.

Lara kicked off her heels and took off after him, each leg exploding out in front of the other like bow strings recoiling, muscles latching as filaments filled by synapse. She was next to Otacon in a heartbeat, then pulling him his arm with her, moving as fast as she could. He might have had a losing chance of keeping up, but he was still typing on his left arm, looking half in trance and half in desperation. Alarms had failed to seize, but where their absence was felt there was only the succumbing hysteria of thousands of terroised would-be passengers on what was otherwise a normal day. They began their inevitable shuffle and sprint to the nearest method of panic, some grabbing bags, others yelling incoherant babblings. There was, of course, the authoritative shouts of men in uniforms and men in suits who began doing their best to rally. By the time both of them had crossed the expansive room to a service corridor's emergency doors, flashlights were already springing on, and there was little in the way of hope they would be far behind.

Lara plunged into the door, swinging its metal bulk before clasping it closed once Otacon was inside, and using a nearby fire extinguisher to brutishly club off the locking mechanism. She broke off the handle in the interrim, and that would do: from the other side, the push-handle would depress but not open the winglock. "Hal, that was bloody fantastic, but tell me you have another trick."

"I don't, but we're off the cameras. Before I left this morning, I dug up access to the airport's power grid. I can't do that again without going up an access level in its power grid, and then I could potentially blow out the control tower." Otacon peered down the hall, bathed in the crimson emergency lights. "We've got two problems."

"Only two?" Lara reached again for guns that weren't there. _Damn._

"The first is getting out of here with Snake and the second is keeping you off any recording device." When Lara looked at him with mild annoyance: "If anybody finds out you're involved, anything you could have done to help us would be finished. Lara, if you want to walk away now, you still can, and-"

"Oh, now you tell me." She turned. There was pounding on the door, and shouting. A smattering of radio chatter was gurgling outside. "Hal, we've got to go, but look, if I want to walk away, I will. Trust me."

They began to move down the hall quickly, trying to hurry but not run. Otacon was tapping at his wearable, and Lara peering back over their shoulder. Periodically, Otacon would remark a direction, and they would follow suit, left, right, straight, so on. The concrete hall held mustard highlights leading them from corner to corner, passing sparse metal doors every tenth foot or so. The red lights were the only dim apparatus allowing their passage through what was otherwise dim to the eye and cool to the skin.

Lara could feel the heart beneath her rib pounding at its cage, adrenaline flooding her veins like an addiction. Otacon in front of her, she felt like they were racing to something bigger than the things around them, that they were at the start of some great unknown with their trespass only a fee over the Sanzu River. This sensation of anticipatory anxiety was elating in its vague terror.

Snake would have understood.

Otacon stopped once they had covered enough ground finding them in the maze of service hallways would be too time-consuming for easy deduction, and Lara was thoroughly disoriented. "Hold on a sec, I have to look at something." He produced a small touch-screen pad with his keyboard-equipped arm, then tapped at the keys with his free hand. "Alright, I think I know where we're going. This could get bad. If I can get to a primary terminal, I can-"

The lights flickered once, twice, then stayed steady.

"Shit," Lara said.

"Aw, that wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I really thought we had at least three or four more minutes. They must have a pretty competent technical staff. Gimme a sec." Otacon went back to his wearable, and was still immersed in it a moment later when one of the doors leading to another corridor snapped open, two plainclothesmen entering.

"Stop! Don't move!" Both officers produced handguns, and trained them on both Lara and Otacon.

"Oh, bugger. I'm really sorry about this."

Lara swung one bare foot over the arm of the closest officer, a brunette, and arced it down. The man doubled forward, losing his pistol in the process, and couldn't recover fast enough to avoid the blow to his teeth, then his nose. Just as the second officer turned his attention from Otacon to her, she hooked her arm around his right, forcing his hands apart and away from the pistol when she collided his head into the side wall. She followed through, her weight baring down on him, knee in the small of his back. It was the only chance she had to keep her face hidden.

"Listen closely, because we don't really have time for a discussion. We need a bit of a favour, and we need you to call it in. We're not here to hurt you, or anybody else, but frankly, this has all been blown out of proportion." Lara glanced over at Otacon, who had taken the liberty of handcuffing the second officer writhing with blood pouring from his nose. His hands had been stained by it, and he did not look pleased by development.

The officer writhed, trying to get enough momentum to get onto his knees and, hence, her off his back.

No luck. He swore under his breath, and Lara let out a sigh.

"You're really not helping much," she said. Otacon handed her his radio, tentative in his approach.

"Thank you, you're very kind. Now." She held the radio to the man's ear. She had torn his suit jacket in the shoulder, and holding the mouthpiece to his lips, she saw the cornflower-blue shirt underneath sticking out. "I'm going to depress the button, and I'd very much appreciate you say...uhm-"

"'Officers Plisken and Danziger to gate seven?'" Otacon offered. "Seven's just a few halls down."

"My, you are clever. Well, you heard the man, call it in." Lara smiled at Otacon reassuringly. He had looked collected earlier, but once the violence had erupted, his skin had gone sepia. She didn't care for his pallor, but there was nothing to be done but get it over with.

The man beneath Lara grunted, and she pushed the button in. The blonde spoke in a soupy Welsh accent. "Code 2, Officers Plisken and Danziger gate Seven. Danziger and Plisken, gate seven."

Lara let the button go. "That's a boy. Now, my mate and I are going to handcuff-ah, thank you for these-and then we're going to leave, and nobody's going to get hurt, yes? Yes, I thought you might agree." Otacon had handed her the handcuffs, which she'd swiftly applied so force to his spine was no long necessary. She then untied the windsor around his collar, and applied the cravat like a gag around his mouth before finally pocketing his radio. "No screaming for you, now. I don't think your passed out friend very vocal, but I imagine you're a bit more feisty. Cheers."

When they ducked back out of the maintenance hall, they came out into the fresh air of the airport's outer perimeter. The door shut and locked behind them. "Well handled in there, Hal, that was marvelous."

The young man's colour was returning, but he still looked lightly shaken. "T-Thank you. Let's just find Snake. This could still get worse, you know."

"My, you're always terribly cheery, aren't you? Right. Well, let's get going."

The trek around the corner wasn't much, but in a moment they realised the shortsightedness of their radioed plan.

"So, any idea on how we're getting out of here, Hal?"

The gates, number five through fifteen, were jammed by traffic. Not a car could move to or away from the curb, where luggage and discard goods lay like corpses. And many had already mounted the curb in the hysteria that had spiraled outwards after the lights had died and order collapsed. People were still in their vehicles, trying to manage an exodus made impossible by their careless haste.

"I don't have the slightest idea."

Officers inside were stopping people from entering or leaving the building, with many people pounding to get in and out. Most looked like a fusion of anger and fear and exhaustion, and Lara felt some degree of sympathy until realising there were people on the ground who'd been injured in the commotion and subsequently being aided by other travelers, undoubtedly due to the pandemonium that had ensued. Lara had spent much time finding western civilisation to be greatly overrated, its populace especially. _For all they knew, some lightbulbs just blew out. _

They moved a few vehicle's distance down then crossed the lanes of stoic traffic, hurriedly ducking between the stationary MGs and Fiats to reach gate seven. On their approach, Lara adjust the sunglasses on her face and tilted her hat's brim down a bit.

Once there, Otacon plopped down on one leg and returned his face to the touchpad and his armband keyboard.

"Writing your memoirs, I take it," she said, not unkindly.

"I'm gonna get us a way out of here, if I can. Try and spot him, could you? He should be a little taller than you, clean shaven, brown hair."

"Well, thank you, that's not half the blokes in the country at all." She murmured under her breath. She began peering around, before it dawned on her. "Wait, H-"

"Hey, no names." Otacon pointed briefly to a camera mounted by the sliding glass doors now guarded by security. Now that he had pointed them out, Lara spotted the others posted at twenty foot invervals.

"Right, apologies. But how is he going to get out of there if the airport's on lockdown?"

Otacon looked up from his screen, at her, and his shoulders slumped.

"...Right, okay, well, no worries. Let's just find a way to fix that, eh? Wait right here, would you?" Lara left Otacon to his device and walked a short jaunt away, looking for some sort of opening. She pondered briefly, scanning the surrounding area for some sort of clue. Luggage, upturned trash bins, broken glass.

Mm, there was a thought.

Lara moved over to a bit of rubbish someone had left behind, a broken suitcase with its contents splayed open like entrails of cloth and bauble scattered about. She crouched down and rummaged around its carcass for the right heft and weight, then came across an iron scuplture. Six, maybe seven kilograms, with an inscription on its underside. She didn't have the heart to read it, considering its purpose. It was perfect.

Lara stood, tossed the paperweight gently in her hand, and picked a spot that might have the most strategic value.

Then, pivoting her torso and rocketing her arm out, she pitched the object through one of the glass panes, and waited.

Inside, the police turned, almost lethargic, and Lara watched as they were too overwhelmed by the hurry of people to leave through the new aperture in their fragile perimeter. Down the walkway, she heard Otacon call out.

"Hey! Uh, Elle! I got it!"

She ran back over, ignoring the sudden exit of impatient travelers a few gates down. "'Elle', mm? What've you got?"

"A cruiser. I managed to forge us an access card to one of the ignition fobs, and my ID's a liquid number instead of a static assignment."

"Come again?"

"I can start one of their vehicles and my license'll say it's assigned to me." Otacon was practically beaming, but their elation was cut painfully short.

In the distance, as the view of the airport lobby's interior cleared, Lara turned to hear a scream that the glass wall had probably sealed off.

It also explained the panic inside.

Lara heard the man before she saw him. Before Lara could process what she was seeing, she heard his scream, drawn out into desperation.

"OTACOOOOOOOOOON!"

"Find that car, we're going to be leaving in a hurry!" Lara began to run inside, not awaiting a response.

As she neared, having to push past other travelers and with security not in the least interested in keeping someone from getting in rather than out, Lara stood just outside their perimeter of action, thinking perhaps there was something she could do. There was little point.

He was in a long tan trenchcoat and an olive suit, what might have been a military dress uniform sans medals or rank, and surrounded by a rotating group of as many as seven other men, all officers of various severity. Three lay on the ground already, and their firearms lay limp next to them. He was unarmed, hands balled into loose fists and with a stance like a man waiting for the next blow to come. The men around him approached carefully, although their prey had already been mildly tenderised. He moved from one officer to the next, flowing like water poured from glass to glass. They were systematically disarmed, thrown to the floor, tossed into one another, arms and legs and bodies smashed or grabbed or battered into sweeping collapse, and all in just a few seconds. The only interruptions came when he was hit, taking a baton to the head twice and another to the ribcage. They were pauses in what was otherwise a series of unprotected attacks against opponents who he greatly outmatched. When there wasn't any other man standing, he stood faced away from her. She could see a stab wound in the back of one thigh, blood seeping through the tan trousers, and when he turned, his face looked reddened from blows. His left eye had started to swell.

"Mister, ah, Danziger is waiting for us. Do you need any..." And she trailed off. He looked at her silently, looking tired, scary, handsome. There was an assymetry to his face she thought was interesting. His neck was cut, and the top collar button had popped off at some point.

"Is he okay?" His voice was like a whetstone's grinding.

"Yes, he's alright. We ran into a spot of trouble." She glanced at the men on the ground. "Bit different from yours, I'd say."

They broke into a jog outside, and started peering around for Otacon. A cruiser pulled up on the sidewalk, Otacon at the wheel, the police jeep crushing suitcase and handbags underneath. Lara got in front, he got in back.

They drove in quiet, with their exit mercifully covered by the chaos of earlier and by the sheer grace of their vehicle passing all electronic checkpoints without incident. Often they had to drive on the shoulder in exiting the massive series of onramps and gate systems leading from parking garages. Traffic made labyrinthine.

When they were sufficiently away from the airport, maybe five minutes out, Otacon let go of a sigh neither of them realised he was holding.

"Okay, I think we're clear. I'll get us to somewhere we can stop, get out of this and take a taxi back to a hotel or somewhere. Thanks for your help in there. Are you guys alright?"

They both voiced in the affirmative.

"Good," Otacon said. "Lara, I'd like you to meet Solid Snake."

END OF PROLOGUE


	6. PART ONE: CHAPTER I

A Note: This was posted originally late last night by mistake in a prototypical form, slippers and nightrobe barely on. This version is a bit more dressed.

* * *

PART ONE

_HONA_

**The house moaned with the attrition of warmth.** There was only the wood's sighing as it contracted from the air's frigid touch. Lara was warmed by the feel of lush isfahan and persian rugs, holding the warmth like magnets. She lightly padded out to the stairroom, replete with fireplace, ottomans, divans, et al. There was little point in trying to sneak up on him, she thought. Lara wondered idly, not if, but when he noticed someone else. When she left her bedroom and began towards the central library, when she changed course noticing that a fire had been lit down the hall, or when she was within just a few feet of him. Maybe Snake didn't notice her at all, skills he might have turned off in the context of being somewhere warm, safe.

Lara thought of her own instincts, and did not believe the last option likely.

Earlier in the day, the three of them had abandoned their police vehicle and made travel arrangements. For the next few days, Snake would stay with Queen and Country and Lara, while Otacon returned to New York, and the two of them following suit the next week. But for the rest of the day and until the late afternoon of the next, they would be retire to Lara's estate for ease of everybody involved. Once, Otacon had protested that Lara provide them accommodation.

"That's ridiculous," she said, their conversation limited by the taximan's presence. Snake was on one side of the vehicle, Otacon in the middle. The former remained remarkably quiet, preferring to gaze out the window and observe rather than interact. "I can pick you up from the airport but not arrange you a bit of lodgings? I'm certainly not commuting to the city again tomorrow."

Otacon began to protest her mock offense, before Snake nudged him. "She's kidding." It was the most he has spoken since leaving the airport.

The drive back to her home had been markedly quiet, likewise. Otacon seemed hesitant in regards to their accommodations and Snake seemed quiet. Any attempt she made to draw them out from such exhaustion was met by apathy from Snake, whose eyes remained chiefly closed, and some modest acknowledgement from Otacon. There wasn't much to be done of it, so she let them rest.

Upon arriving, and Otacon remarking to the size of her expansive Palladian home, Winston showed them to the guest bedrooms where they would be staying. Otacon thought it best to convene later, after he had made arrangements for himself and changed the plans via internet for their departure next week. Lara stated she'd want to go to over the Philanthropy details with them both and discuss things later, over dinner perhaps, and they acquiesced to something close to that.

Snake, for his part, thanked them both for the help, neither curt nor warm, and left to his bedroom.

"Rather moody a lot, is he, Hal?" She watched him go, his shoulders slumped ever so slightly, his gait off from the wound she'd seen earlier.

"No, not really," Otacon said. "I don't know what's up. Maybe it was just a little exhausting. I'm probably going to get a nap in before dinner, myself."

When dinner rolled around and Lara awaited Otacon's company, after showering and with a change of clothes feeling a bit more like herself, they made small talk. About Otacon's time at University, of Lara making a go of it and disdaining the boredom. Of romantic interests, from which Lara could discern Otacon had little in the way of masculine conquests. Of what they thought of technology, or culture, but little that she was entirely captivated by, although she did remark of being impressed with Otacon's technological talents, which he had no shame in basking in.

Buried in the back of her mind throughout all of it, there was a sensation, in spite of meeting Snake, of feeling let down somehow, of the vagary that had come from his curious quietude and hating still to wait more for something more pressing.

After dinner had been served, Winston informed Lara, quietly and with minimum fuss, that Snake had gently declined their invitation, and would dine at a later time. Lara furrowed her brow, asked Otacon, and was met with his concern.

"I wonder if he's alright," Otacon said, mouth tilted slightly to one side.

She told him that "he seemed alright earlier, he's probably just exhausted from being beat like an egg," but Otacon remained worried regardless.

When their plates had been swept away, Otacon went over a few things with her, mostly trivial details and points of necessary interest regarding Philanthropy. How much they would need in capital, what their resource needs might be, and how to get Nastasha's account published. She informed him of the calls she'd made, hoping that delivering the news of disinterest wouldn't affect him much, and she wasn't wrong. They were both realists as to its difficulty, but the glimmer of hope was that a British house with an American branch showed interest after speaking with Lara directly. There was hope as to an abridged version seeing the light of day inside the late summer schedule, and if sales met well, that perhaps a second printing of the full text being reintroduced.

The clock nearby began chiming close to ten when they both called it an evening, and Otacon seemed more himself again by its end. A very small amount of vermouth had a part in that, and Lara had taken a bit of red wine with their meal. It was for that bit of social balm that he accepted her hug before going to bed. She felt they both needed the reassurance. Philanthropy was so out of both of their fields of expertise that it seemed monolithic in its execution.

When Lara awoke around one in the morning, she heard only the sound of her own window and its breezy whisperings. After Lara had traipsed down the hall upon finding Snake out in the den, she felt his presence more keenly, surprised she had not sensed some sort of disturbance in the air around her; Snake was making no effort to be unnoticed.

Snake turned before she spoke. His facial structure reminded Lara of a racing dog, thin muscles laid over prominent cheekbones and a mouth that held little expression, most of it instead conveyed in his eyes and brow. There was a keenness to watching him, enjoyable in its roughshod symmetry.

The swelling in his cheek had gone down, and she noticed bandages on the reading table in front of him. Iodine, gauze, a needle and thread, and a snifter of brandy. He was shirtless, and in the low light she could see only a handful of scars, the fireplace illuminating only his front half, which she couldn't see from her angle, and his arms, which she could.

"Can't sleep?" Her voice sounded voluminous in the vacant space, reverberating almost in the panels of oak and mahogany. She almost regretted speaking, like she had intruded in something private.

"No luck. I don't sleep a whole lot, anyway." He picked up the needle and thread and began working at one last cut just past his elbow. It looked clean, at least, which was more than could be said of other scars long-healed that ran jagged bolts across his forearm.

"May I join you?" She glanced at the implements in front of him again, and frowned. "Did Winston give you the whole bottle? How long have you been drinking?"

Snake nodded his head in acceptance to the crimson fainting couch across from him. "Your butler, right? Couple hours. I was hoping it'd put me to sleep, but I didn't know I'd torn my stitches when I passed out earlier."

"Passed out?" She sat down, and watched as he applied the brandy and began threading the needle through his skin. "I imagine I've most of the story, but what exactly happened out there?"

"I couldn't sleep on the fly over. Glad I didn't. When everybody started deboarding I noticed a steward pointing me out to the captain and I did my disappearing act before security showed up. I got lucky."

"Mm, is that what lucky passes for nowadays?"

"Lucky is any time I don't get shot at. I'd made for an emergency exit and one of the guards fired at me, could have hit a civilian." Snake clicked his tongue in disgust, and she wondered if it was a matter of professional pride that he made a differentiation between protocol in that sort of scenario, or if it was out of the recklessness of the behaviour exhibited.

"So how'd you get a hold of Hal?" She watched the methodical routine of his stitches, surprised his hand was so steady.

"I ended up finding a private area and used one of the mounted service phones to call the airport traveler's desk."

"Wouldn't they just have found out which service phone you were on?"

"No, not like that. I called the traveler's desk and asked if a concierge could contact my flying partner with a courtesy phone."

"Ah, I think I see now. So they thought you were a customer, and as such no one would be looking at what the inbound number was."

"If they had, I probably would have gotten boxed in a service hall," he said. Lara watched a few droplets of blood move a runnel along his arm and tumble to the rug beneath him. She doubted Winston would notice.

They were quiet for a few moments, as she watched the suture slowly advance up his arm. It wasn't deep, or especially long, but she admired the tenacity of it.

"I've never used brandy before," She said.

Snake looked at her, curious.

"Usually," she lifted up the cuff of one pantleg, revealing a scar moved across her ankle, slipping up diagonally to the back of her calf. "There's isopropyl on the dig. I try to bring medical stuff I'll get the most use out of. There's not much point in bringing medications most of the time."

Snake smiled, and Lara felt a small surge like pride, but not quite. Close, but not quite.

"Why didn't you join us for dinner? You were more than welcome."

Snake shrugged. "I'm not really big on banquets and table conversation. Besides, I was too tired from earlier to eat. One of them almost broke my skull in."

"Two, actually."

"Hn?" He looked at her, eyebrow raised, which she replied by smiling demurely. He grumbled to himself, "Thought it was one."

"Sleep and penchant for my spirit cabinet aside, you're feeling better, though?"

He nodded.

"I'm glad. Hal was worried about you, I think."

"I know. He woke me up after you guys went to sleep, asked if something was up. After that, I noticed the blood on the sheet."

"Lord. You raid my liquor cabinet, stain my guest bedroom with blood, and skip out on bonding time. Some house guest you yanks make, I'll say."

When Lara reached across the table for his brandy, he didn't protest, only silently watched in observation as she sipped it, put it back, and refilled the glass. He drank likewise in quiet, informal toast.

"This is some place you have. Was that wing we're in just guest bedrooms?"

"It is. The other wings are my exercise rooms, the master wing, which has my quarters and the service-person's rooms, and the dining halls." She gestured to a large mural behind him, dimly lit by the flames' pirouettes. "If you can believe it, that was painted around the nineteen thirties, during the war. My father's father was an engineer, my grandmother a doctor. Shortly after they commissioned the painting, the manor was abandoned for almost two years, because my grandmother was adamant that Germany would invade sooner or later. When the Nazi's never did, my grandparents had already set up a small life a country away, so by the time they returned, the manor had been struck by lightning and almost a quarter of it burned, and half ruined from weather damage. Our second cellar held most anything of value, though, so the majority of these paintings, rugs, and so on survived, that mural included. Those two little bodies you see in front of the estate are my grandparents."

Snake had sealed his arm but not yet bandaged it, and when he turned to look at it, she got a better view of his back. She felt dirty by seeing him that way, with its myriad pockmarks, indentations. It was a far cry from her most recent male companion's unmarred body. There was only a brief glance, and she saw a rough past laid out like a ruined map on his skin. In an instant, she turned her eyes away, as if she had broken a sort of trust.

"It seems like it's kept you well," He said, not mindful of her sudden apprehension.

"It-it is. Yes, well." She cleared her throat. "My family's held this house for almost two hundred years, and until almost fifty years ago, they all lived under this roof."

"What's a few people to a place this big?"

"Snake, my father was the youngest of eleven children," she said, laughing a bit.

"Eleven kids?" He made a grimacing face that she couldn't be sure was from conceiving of such a fraternity or from tugging at the fresh sutures. "That's a lot of mouths to feed. Do you talk to your uncles much?"

"Plus their husbands and wives residing here, too." Lara bit her lip. "I'm afraid my father's brothers are not very approving of what I've done with the estate. Is it alright if we leave it at that?"

He just bobbed his head slightly in acknowledgement.

"Snake, do you have any family?"

As soon as she uttered the question, she recalled reading of his past, however brief its mention, in the book. His patricidal brother. His monomaniacal father.

Their distant, awful legacy.

"Don't you already know?" Snake's anger caught her off guard, and she found herself having to recover by its suddenness.

"Oh, god, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't mean to..."

The room was empty of sound for a moment.

"It's alright. Sorry." He looked from the fire, to her, and back again. "It's a little strange when someone else's had a chance to sift through your past, is all. Should be used to it by now." Snake produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one. If not for her gaff, she would have condemned it.

"I didn't mean anything by it. If you had preferred I hadn't read it…"

"No, if you're trusting us, we're trusting you." Snake paused. Thought. She could see something glimmering in his eyes as it happened, a surety of rumination. "I don't know much. Most of what I do know is in that book."

"I can't imagine what they'd be like," she said.

Snake looked at her, and when she did, she discovered for the first time staring him in the eyes too long hurt for some reason.

"Neither can I."

The sound of flames hurried in, a low expiring sound. Snake watched it with inordinate fascination, as though there was divination to be had therein.

"Snake?"

He looked at her.

"I want to make sure I've got this right. I haven't been having second thoughts, but…"

Otacon was right; he was a good listener, she decided. Snake leaned back, body askance of her and more towards the fireplace, as he waited for her to gather her thoughts. After a moment, Lara continued.

"It's awfully bloody complicated. At this Alaskan island, Shadow Moses, you, having been in this sort of spot before, were blackmailed into going into a dangerous place and tasked with the rescue of three people you don't know or care for, and stopping a sort of weapon that's been almost seen production before. In the process, you run a gauntlet of the renegade unit that's taken over this base, and learn of a much more sinister relationship as than any I can recall. I'm not trying to be reductive, but is that about the whole of it?"

Snake nodded.

"Snake, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"How was that possible for you? Did you regret it?"

Snake seemed to consider this for a moment, as if regret had not been an option. "No, I don't think so. It's what needed to be done. I wasn't doing much, anyway."

She laughed. "How can you be so cavalier about it?"

"Do you pat yourself on the back that you're on magazine covers and in documentaries?" If she had not been watching him intently, she would have mistaken this for mockery, but his smile was soothing; viral. "I just don't think about it very much. The Colonel needed me to help his niece. I did."

"And that's all? I have a hard bloody time believing that." When Snake looked at her with one eyebrow lifted, she waved a hand away. "I'm sorry, is this too forward for a first talk?"

"No, I like things straightforward," Snake said, looking back to his stitching. "I'd guess you do, too."

Strangely, she blushed, then put his comment and any ennui regarding it out of her head.

"My family's always been a bit of a society type," Lara said. "Under Victoria, they made the papers after moving to London and declaring they would personally commission Conan Doyle to resume the Holmes stories. Of course, it never came to pass, and he did anyway, but we've always seemed to be in the news, albeit now it's in a very different light. Or we're interested in them, at least. Fame and English and history have been the callings of the blood, if I may turn a phrase."

"I know about the fame and the English, so; did you read a lot when you were little?" He asked, sipping at the brandy.

"No, just the standards. My mum read me The Faraway Tree, Carroll, really common stuff. Of Doyle, I recall reading one of the stories, and there's was a woman who beat Holmes. Of all the things! I thought it was marvelous. She was described as an adventuress, going to the continent, to the colonies, being an opera singer, all sorts of things. I still think of that story sometimes." They seemed to have pleasantly drifted off course, so she corrected it. "So how much of my past do you know, Snake?"

He tilted his head, as if to say _enough._ "Nothing private, trust me. What would you characterise it as?"

"Most of what I've been experienced with," she said, "is getting into places most people can't or won't without a lot of gear to me, and getting something out that might otherwise take years to disarm traps or traverse uncharted catacombs." Again a self-conscious laugh. "I'm not cursing good fortune or being falsely modest, mind, just… It's nothing like this. I want to help very much. I'm not sure this will sustain me forever, and I feel…" Again, she was at a loss. "I read all of the book. I understand it, I mean, it's not disbelief. Save for that name."

"Huh?"

"Your name," Lara said. "Of all the sobriquets you could have, it's Snake. A mite conspicuous, you think?"

He shrugged it off. "A lot of those names are legacy titles. There's not very many people who don't receive a codename others haven't already had."

"And your real name," Lara asked.

She could feel the mirth in the room expire, as if she had made oratory a draft of arctic sigh.

"Otacon didn't tell you?"

She shook her head.

He didn't look at her, not out of any malice or apathy she could fathom from his expression. If anything, a sadness. "David."

In the flickering amber glow, his melancholy was attractive, and Lara felt the pang of guilt for her thoughts.

Her voice wound itself with the fire's. "It suits you," she said, and when he smiled slightly, sadly, she wondered why someone could be so lonely.

"Snake, I have another question."

"Go ahead."

"You've spent so much effort and time doing this sort of thing before. Otacon mentioned you were in the CIA even before Shadow Moses."

"It didn't suit me, but yeah, for a while."

Lara looked at the snifter of brandy, was tempted, decided against it.

"I suppose I'm asking why. Why this, why now, why Philanthropy, Nastasha, Hal, myself. And, well… Why you, Snake?"

He reached for the brandy, polished off the glass, and thought for a moment.

"When I left Shadow Moses, I went back to Alaska with somebody. When I settled back in, I realised there wasn't anything left for me. I had dogs to mush, but not much else. I had somebody, but we… disagreed about where to go forward. And I thought there was something more ahead, something I didn't have before. I gave up a lot of my life, over the years, a lot of sleep. There wasn't anything left inside me, nothing at all. No hatred, not even regret. And yet sometimes at night I could still feel the pain creeping up inside me. Slithering through my body."

"So you did this to… alleviate your pain?"

Snake inhaled deeply of the cigarette one last time, let the smoke waft out, and threw it into the fire. "At first, I thought that's what I wanted. No, what I wanted was to make sure I didn't live my life the way Liquid did. Or Big Boss."

"As a response to them?" Lara asked, "Your…" Lara could not bring herself to say _brother, father_, false terms to people she barely understood. She did not venture a guess as to how much Snake understood them.

"No, just the opposite. They were obsessed with reacting to somebody else instead of acting of their own accord, finding their own path, and by only reacting it made them too passive. Up until that period, when I left the island alive, I knew I had to find something more to create or else I'd end up with no motive to move on. I was tired of going forward with no victory, no defeat. Of running away.

"When I got home," Snake said, "it wasn't long before I heard about the aftermath. Ocelot, one of the unit's members, had disappeared, and so had Metal Gear's data. I heard because an old friend still with the agency told me they'd saddled me with that, and with breaking out FOXHOUND's spy, Naomi Hunter. The rest wasn't hard, there's only one thing to do with something that valuable. Metal Gear isn't going to be a specialised weapon anymore. It's going to become another tool among a hell of a lot more. And I couldn't let it happen, not when I made the mistake of letting him get ahold of the data to begin with."

Lara shook her head, not quite following. "So why not grassroots activism? Take to the press. To the internet."

"That's Otacon's field. We'll be doing a little bit of both, really, but I don't know much about it." Snake hesitated. "What Liquid said was still rattling around. That I wasn't…" Lara watched Snake almost say _natural_, then recant it. "…normal. I was made to fight, but I'm not a gun, a tool. I can't let that be true."

"And Philanthropy?"

"There needed to be a body of people who'd work in or out of the law to stop Metal Gear from spreading. It'll destablise everything. Once it's widespread, there's nowhere left to go if every nationstate's got a deathmachine. And nobody will know any better, any way to combat it. I needed to find people who could fight in ways I can't. Fight establishments, or the media. Fight this era of postmodern war. I needed people who could help me fight the biggest beast of all."

"Who?"

"The times. Sooner or later, Metal Gear is going to change the way we live and breathe, and we might be the only ones who know it's coming."

Lara listened to the crackle of burning lumber.

She extended her hand to his. When Snake took it, she felt warmed, excited, even scared.

"I made the right choice, joining you. Whatever I can do, Snake, whatever role you need me to fill, I want to be a part of this."

"Thank you." Snake stood, grabbing his shirt off the cushion beside him. Winston must have provided him a change of clothes before he had retired, because he was in thin sweats. He smiled, and seeing it spread across his face, she understood the appeal he must had to the Silverburgh woman. She felt a familiar sensation by the proxy of his body to hers. "Forget most of this, anyway. The alcohol's made me too talky."

"I think it's done wonders for your demeanor. Goodnight, Snake."

Lara stood, went to put out the fire, then thought of the cold. Of her bed, of loneliness.

When she turned to reconsider company with him, if only a bit more time surrounded by books and the fire and a decanter between them, he was gone.


	7. PART ONE: CHAPTER 2

Winston's voice, craggy with age but timbre like an antediluvian oak, boomed over the loudspeaker. "OPEN FIRE!"

Snake dove forward, behind an outcropping of sienna bricks the size of tumbled pillar segments. The rifle vomited fire, reports like aural whipcracks synchronised to succeed each other on the order of halfseconds. Volleys of bullets, in bouts of three, tumbled like violent steel cyclones burrowing through air thinner all the time. His breath came out in disappearing mist clouds, surrounding by a drizzle so consistent he was soaked. The gun in his hands bucked, kicking at his shoulder, his palm, clawing for purchase with a demonic resolve to leap from his hands, muzzle attempting to leap everywhere but straight. He steadied it carefully even as sight and sound were being slowly diminished by the constant flashing and cracking of round after round being blown out like malicious bees escaping a hive.

Lara watched him perform quietly from her bedroom window overlooking the course. He'd been at it for over an hour, and she stood leaned against one window pane with rapt attention as to his ability.

Otacon had gotten up early, five or six, and had bid them good luck. They'd agreed to follow him to the states in the coming days, a week later at most, so Lara gave him a hug (and Snake a sketchy, informal salute) before shuttling him off into a chauffeur's care. He would be flying out some miles south of the city on a private runway, arranged by carefully choreographing another identity and chartering a private pilot's services to Switzerland, before a commercial flight back to the States under another assumed name. Snake had mentioned it to Otacon before having come to England, as a non-EU country might be easier to escape pursuit through.

Secretly Lara was pleased to be alone with Snake. The night prior had left her with as many questions as she had to begin with, each one leading to a more pertinent one. It was only the retrospection the fews hours distance from the evening had lent her that he had pointedly steered the conversation away from himself for the most part, giving her information and letting her lead them both away. She admired the cleverness of it. Or would have if it wasn't so obnoxious.

Otacon had pulled her aside briefly before his departure.

"Is everything okay? I hope he didn't give you too much trouble."

"Trouble, Hal?" she had asked. "What do you mean?"

"I came out to the library this morning and there were bloody bandages all over the table."

She had laughed, told him they'd had a nice chat, and that Winston left her wing alone in regards to cleaning until late morning, in case she had decided to sleep in, and that the only problem Snake had given her was some gauze to dispose of.

Once Otacon had gone, she ran a brief errand in the city, before letting Snake (and Winston, who reflected respectful skepticism of her new business partners) know that The Man Who had run of the grounds, and should he need anything, he was to feel free to explore, with exception to locked doors and her bedroom.

Upon her return, Winston informed her that he had eaten a breakfast of steak and eggs, and promptly disappeared to the wood-chip running track that disappeared into the woods surrounding the estate. In her office, she also had two callers. First, from a man who wanted to know if she would be available to speak of some sponsorship opportunities for a sports drink of some type, which she promptly deleted.

The second was from Francis.

She heard his voice, and feeling a mix of guilt, light self loathing, and repulsion by his brashness, she deleted both of his messages.

When she returned from her bedroom after a short shower and change, that's when she heard the gunfire outside, in the obstacle range.

The obstacle range was a series of cover points arranged outdoors near the topiary maze, a combination obstacle course, its central path laced with hazards like fallaway pits filled with mud, moving hazards like foam beams that would protrude suddenly from any given wall in an attempt to trip or hinder movement, and complete with moving targets that would pop from cover points with small apparatuses made to fire small plastic pellets designed with fiber microhooks so they clung to cloth like velcro. The human-sized targets spread across a series of small pop-up inlays, placed on a rail mount system so they could (within reason) move dynamically forward and past various edifices, as well strafe.

Snake had, presumably with Winston aid, borrowed one of the rifles she kept for practice and had asked him to turn on the course. Only at its outset when she noticed him, he had repeated the course once already, and looked, while determined, to be having the time of his life. He moved with speed and grace in a way that surprise her, not in the least bit stylish save for the economy of motion with which he moved. The very act of moving, the manipulation of simple muscles, seemed practiced.

Upon completion of the last round, she went downstairs, and out into the garden. Winston had left the observation tower mounted above the course's perimeter and Snake was examining his weapon.

"Having fun with my toys, I take it?" She traipsed behind him, opened the glass cabinet mounted along one brick wall at the course's outset, and took a pistol from the shelf inside.

"This is a high caliber weapon. It's made with combat in mind." He was examining the slide mechanism of it, checking its modified iron sights for imperfections.

"I've no doubt. I take it you think I should stock my course with live persons, then? Any volunteers?"

"Cute. No, I mean what are you doing to warrant this sort of fire power?" He placed the rifle back in the same shelving cabinet Lara had taken her pistol from.

"Would you believe I enjoy Guy Fawkes day reenactments? I've got them for protection, Snake, what else? Sometimes I run into unsavoury characters. Sometimes those unsavoury sort have big guns and big pecs and don't like girls like me running around taking what belongs to them and their big—"

"I get it."

"I don't think you do." She held the gun out to him, handle first. "Snake, really, I'm not an amateur. I understand you might think civilians might not have a need for this sort of thing, but there are people who do what I do, but for profit."

"Profit? From… digging around graveyards?" He took the pistol and checked its chamber, its magazine. Empty.

"You've really turned on the charm today," Lara said. Snake muttered an apology. "Apology accepted. Your opinion of my vocation aside, yes, there's rather a lot of fellows determined to make a large sum from the collection of antiquities and relics. Call it avarice, or lust, or just megalomania, they are people with far too much money, and time, and are willing to—"

"Basically buy what amounts to historical artifacts." Snake loaded his firearm. "I didn't mean anything, I was just surprised. You don't seem like the guns-first-questions-later type."

"Good of you to think so, because I'm not. But being well versed in a broad education does wonders, I think." Winston had come over with a small printout of Snake's performance, and she snatched it before Snake could reach for it. Lara did not tell him that his performance surprised her. She was enjoying that she might have actually caught him off-guard. "Thank you, Winston. I don't enjoy shooting another human being, Snake, but the alternative is significantly less pleasant. They're essentially mercenaries. They've been paid to do a job, and it is certainly easier to shoot someone of my disposition than reason a bargain of some diplomacy."

Snake nodded. "I know the type. Dogs who'll do most anything for money. I should know, I've done jobs with people like that."

Lara tsked her tongue at him in mock derision, and he swatted at her shoulder.

"Now that we've established that nasty business, how about a little competition?"

Lara smiled at Winston and motioned to the observation tower.

Snake let a smirk creep up the side of his face, and reached for the rifle cabinet.


	8. PART ONE: CHAPTER 3

Sunset was a series of pomegranate waves flushed with tangerine, shot through emerald leaves. It was the beauty of hideous storms that have passed by a thin margin, eager to return. Rain had come in a drizzle towards the end of the afternoon with light, flushing intervals, drizzling down for ten minutes, quarter of the hour at most, then dying for double that time. It left the gardens vibrant, the air brisk and sobering. Leaves fanned themselves for its touch. Each blade of grass peered up, mouths open for the drink. The clay of the Croft grounds was left darkened into passing distance of coffee colour, the mortar auburn, the bricks given to darkened mood.

It was during one of the dry spots, the afternoon waning into evening and signs of the night sky's rumour coming to pass that they called it a night. The rest of their days in England would not be long; this one seemed to both of them to stretch out like a summer respite in April. 15°C was not out of the question.

The practice came out even, fair. Twice Lara, then Snake, which spurred on her competitive streak, and brought out a joy in him she hadn't yet witnessed. She hadn't expected his agility, things that could not be conveyed in Nastasha's account, nor his speed. Whereas Lara found herself bounding off of objects or somersaulting beyond their reach, Snake was keen to dive under, aside, and, reminding her of the Gordian knot, stopping one dead with the stock of his rifle. While Lara was most often on her feet, she found Snake on one knee, or in a static position for firing. At the end of every course, she also noticed he only focused on one attribute of its offerings or the other: speed or accuracy. In between, they compared commentary on firearms, shooting styles, and even a little flirtation. She was surprised by the last, feeling maybe her worry for him was unfounded. The impression she had taken from the night previous might have been incomplete by much more than she had anticipated.

After two bouts with Winston at the settings, she requested he turn up the settings for the mobile obstacle speed, which increased the velocity of various rotating foam pads lining parts of the course or emerging at chest length from others, as well as tackling dummies that would dart of hidden compartments at a moment's notice. It was Winston's duty only to make their lives as difficult as possible whilst manning the course, and (again at her request), he did not spare them in effort.

Around dusk, they retired, sweaty and starving, for the house. There was little more to be had in their formalised play, but in her pre-dinner shower, she thought of the askance smile she caught more than once on his face during it. His eyes lit up, his teeth gritted in concentration. Once, she could have sworn she heard a laugh like a dog's anticipatory bark. She wondered of his age, knowing he must have close to ten years on her, and found a sproutling of admiration.

When he came to dinner, wearing another choice from the men's guest closet composited of odd ends composed over the years by other passersby in her home, she found her eyes pausing too long at the length of his legs, or size of his hands.

Lara had entertained Otacon in the dining room and she planned to do so again, but changed the location at Snake's request for a less formal occasion. They ate instead on dual camelback sofas in the central hall, with another wall lined by books (fiction, this time) and the staircase leading to each wing at the north-south walls behind each of them. They would each had to lean forward to eat over the coffee table, something Lara was accustomed to only when without company.

"You smell."

Snake looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

"Tobacco. God, that's an awful habit. I hope Hal's given you grief over it."

Snake produced a pack of cigarettes and opened its lid. Inside there were only brown crumbs.

"Good," Lara said. "You're not likely to buy more, I hope."

"Lost all my luggage from that thing at the airport," he said. Snake was pacing the shelves, glancing up and down their list. "A copy of The Pentagon Papers? I'm impressed."

"I've never read it, actually." Snake looked at her askance, and she laughed. "Are you surprised? This house has almost three generation's worth of books, Snake, it's not bloody likely I've read most of them. So, Mister Scholar, what is it?"

"A treatise on Vietnam, after a fashion. It's not exactly light reading."

"My mother was actually in Vietnam, briefly." Lara glanced down the hall for the time. Dinner would be short in coming; Winston had asked for requests and Snake had been eager to suggest more steak. "Not during the war, but she saw firsthand a rather large amount of the war's fallout. Volunteered for a some of the mine removal."

"Must have been a brave lady."

Lara looked at crest above the mantle. "She was, but what makes you say that?"

"Most people avert their eyes when something ugly happens." He continued idling around the stock of hardbacks. "You have a humidifier for these, huh. Pages only lightly yellowed. Well cared for."

"I'm glad you approve." Lara looked down at the coffee table, where there were papers Otacon had left for them to look over. One was the original design documents for Metal Gear REX, his creation the year previous, with its capabilities laid out in layman's terms scribbled atop the photocopies. Another was a digital tablet with a variety of resources left to them, a series of photographs and strange text files. "So, have any thoughts on the lot of this?" She rifled a paper at him.

"Yeah. Otacon had a few objectives in mind even before we got started."

"Started with what?" she asked.

"There was a report he went digging up in Bolivia almost a month back. We were trying to gauge whether or not there was a need for this sort of thing. I already guessed there would be, but we needed at least one example to take to people in case the book didn't get any takers."

Lara raised an eyebrow. "You mean you've gone to other people aside from myself?"

"Just three. One was someone Otacon knows, but couldn't find her. Apparently a genius with computers, and seeing as most of this is digital stuff anyway, he figured a second pair of hands couldn't hurt." He was still turned away from her and the light was much better than the night before, but she heard his reluctance anyway. "Computers aren't exactly my, uh, strong suit."

"You can't digitize everything anyway. So, who else?"

"A guy who did advisor work as a contractor for FOXHOUND. Name of George Kessler." Snake was running a finger over a shelf, head tilted to read titles, occasionally turning his head over to speak to her. "Big Boss had recruited him from his days as a merc, but when Big Boss turned, if he was ever really for the unit, Kessler strayed behind. Said an injury changed him."

"Did it?" Lara asked.

Snake gave a shrug and a grunt. "A lot of Big Boss's past is classified, even from other people in the unit. I don't know much, save for in the sixties, he was working for the CIA when he did the op that got him his title. A hero from the second World War defected and he shut her down. After that, there's not a lot of info."

"You're not that far off, either, you know?"

"Well, after Nastasha publishes her book," Snake said, "there's not much chance of that. I'll be another fiction in a series of them." Snake dipped his head, shook it once, then sat across from her. She could see his restlessness. "There's a lot of rumours that get thrown around the military. Half of them are crap. The other half barely have anything to them."

"Like what?"

"Like Delphi's Iron Mountain stuff. Fiction with truth in it tends to expand too big, too fast, and people forget the part of it that's embellished."

"Not unlike fame," she said, glancing at the way Snake played with his lighter. It gleamed in the fading light, and as the windows grew less illuminating, the interior sensors automatically accommodated with artifice. "And not a word about cup size. Rewinding a sec, what happened to Kessler? Not interested?"

"No," Snake said. "Liquid had him murdered. Same with anyone who changed sides on Big Boss after the eighties."

When Winston came into the silent room, their appetites had not returned.

"May I ask of the last recruit?"

Snake shifted in his seat, grumbling under his breath, reaching for the water beside his plate. "Another Moses survivor. Meryl Silverburgh."

"Your Colonel Campbell's niece?"

Snake nodded.

"Weren't you two…?"

Another grunt, a nod.

"I'm sorry. This must be rather forward."

"You keep saying that." Snake picked at his potatoes carioca, shifting slices like tectonic plates.

"Why didn't she join? Was it personal?"

This, at least, seemed to give Snake some relief. "No, thankfully. It was that we had different views on where to go."

"And her proposal?"

"That we do things by the book, try and work with the system. When she didn't join up, that's when we started looking for other agents. We were hoping for Kessler, but…" Snake shook his head. "Meryl's got her own life, and for some damn reason, that's with the military. I hear the Army reconfirmed her contract. She was formally enlisted before but after Moses, a lot of people got moved to different areas. Somehow, she managed to stay with field work. Meryl's one of the lucky ones. Otacon was out and out dismissed by Armstech for cooperating with terrorist activities. Meryl's… complex, I don't know, she doesn't get that not biting the hand that feeds doesn't mean she'll get more food. She's being used and doesn't care."

"Do you, Snake?" Lara peered at him, and when he met her gaze, she felt petty for a strange cattiness that was unlike her.

For a while, they ate in silence, the clinking of silverware and porcelain like abbreviations in between them.

"When I got back to my place in Twin Lakes, Meryl was told she didn't have a place back at her base. There was going to be a formal investigation of everyone involved."

"Snake, I appreciate this, but really, I was out of line."

"No, to hell with it, I don't want to dance around things. It's going to happen sooner or later." Snake leaned back, took a sip of the lager provided, and proceeded. "Meryl had a lot of problems, but she got the light end of it. For Campbell, they threw him in a cell for two weeks, called it a debriefing. The same thing for Naomi, except that was more permanent. Espionage charge, for colluding with the terrorists. I hear someone broke her out a couple months back, but I don't have a clue."

"And you?"

"Technically, they never found me," Snake said.

"How?"

"When they knocked me out and dragged my ass to a naval base, they caught me headed just out of town. Apparently they never found my house, about three hours south of anything resembling civilisation." Talking more openly, Snake found his appetite. Short work was being made of his meal. "Alaska's a big place with a lot of trees. I'd had my house commissioned from an engineer in the area, built for no carbon emissions. Helped me stay off the radar long enough, I guess. When Meryl needed a place to stay, I offered her my cabin until about eight months ago, turn of the new year.

"When I let her move in, it wasn't just the inquisition she was worried about. She and I were the only non-stationed combatants that made it out of the island. I don't think she thought she could relate to anyone else. I'd been living alone for a long time, and company seemed…" He let the words drift apart, drifting away like leaves in a stream. "When I figured I couldn't stay in Alaska forever, she didn't take to it well. She wanted something I couldn't give her. I tried floating the Philanthropy idea past her, but it wouldn't stick. She kept insisting that there could be a place for me in the US again." He looked at his hands. "Moses left her with scars nobody should have. Especially not a woman."

Lara studied his face, the lines under his eyes. "And your scars?

Snake turned away from her regard. "I can deal with mine."

Lara said nothing.

Snake finished his beer, placed it next to an empty plate. Lara had hardly touched hers. "After we had slept together, Meryl told me she needed to find some way to make it important that she had survived everything. That there had to be a reason. I don't think she knows surviving's reason enough."

Lara thought of Peru. Of Malaysia, Cambodia, Kenya. Of friends who had strength to barely make it. Of friends long gone who had not enough.

"I left Meryl a note, the keys to my cabin, told her to stay as long as she wanted, have the dogs taken care of."

"You've gave her your house?" she asked.

"I didn't have much use for it. Alaska to New York is a hell of a commute." At this, Lara laughed at his deadpan, and Snake brightened for it. "Besides, I knew I couldn't stay in Twin Lakes. If the Pentagon could find me, so could anybody else." Snake moved across the table to sit next to her, picking up Otacon's files in the middle of the table. "We should get to work."

Lara was pleased she let none of her disappointment show in face or voice, or so she believed. "Of course. Bolivia's quite the topic, and I'm certain you've enough to make for an interesting evening."

For a moment, Lara only looked at him expectantly. Snake would not meet her eyes still. He looked bemused, and not unpleasantly. Surprised, if anything.

"I've never talked this much about myself," he said.

Lara smiled gently at him. "You should do it more often. You have interesting stories."

Snake looked at the clock, and began talking of their first assignment.


	9. PART ONE: CHAPTER 4

"Do you have a musical preference?" Lara asked, eyes half lidded, feeling weightless, the player piano tapping out bright ivory plinkings like the sound of snow in midday.

"Brit rock?" Snake was holding a collins glass with ice and scotch.

"Why, that's a brilliant idea, hold on." Lara began scanning the shelves of vinyl recordings, LP's, EPs, rows after rows of stacked records for something appropriate. She felt sufficiently sauced from the wine with dinner, which was becoming an odd sort of bonding source between them both. She so rarely had alcohol that the past week's consumption seemed ribald in comparison. She did not imagine there would be much room for recreation in the months to come, so she was not discomfited by their use.

"This was your idea, you know. You could be less broad. If you want, we could go to the conservatory, although there's a few more things in there we could break if we weren't careful." She was still flipping through the titles and artists, looking for something that might suit him. Lara couldn't imagine trying to buy for him, let alone find him music.

After their conversation of his past, there was a great deal of discussion as to their future. Otacon had left on the tablet a series of maps and documents regarding Bolivia. He had dug up information regarding a budding nationstate in its rainforests as to a potential upheaval of the Bolivian government calling themselves el Che's Chico, or The Boys of Che.

It was a poorly organised group, but included in the files was a series of photos that had been smuggled out of the country of a pair of massive metal legs, like rectangular versions of a cat's. It was just the pair and a hips holding them together amongst a large outdoor construction, the haziness of the photograph lending not much aid to any other potential intel that could be gleaned from it. Its construction had been housed underneath a series of networked scaffolds, webwork meshes that both concealed the area surrounding the scaffolds and provided a rough protection from the elements. Mist made it almost impossible to discern much more than its size, easily three stories high or more.

"Good god," she had said. "Is that how big the bloody thing is? Is that REX?"

"No," he had said. "REX had more armor than that, and REX had been completed. This looks similar, and Otacon's note says the leg motor is only similar, whatever that is. And this thing doesn't seem to be armed."

Lara picked up the glossy paper, examined its shabby camerawork. "Is that really what you've destroyed?"

Snake poured himself a water from a carafe they'd had provided with dinner. "More or less, yeah. Metal Gear has always been designed with two legs and a nuke in mind. The definition's a little more precise than that, but as a warfare tool, that's been its strategic advantage. I don't know what the hell a pair of legs would be doing in Bolivia yet, though. If the government there found out, they'd be burned to a crisp along with the rest of the rainforest."

Lara had shaken her head at him. "No, there's too much foliage. They'd need a defoliant of some sort if they were ever going to find something like this, especially if they're buried deep in its wetlands. There's too much forestry for them to cover every part of it. It's actually rather elegant. So, what does this mean? Did Otacon intend to take this information to the authorities?"

Snake had looked at her.

"What? That's not an unreasonable question. I know you both want to get your hands dirty, but some level of authorisation has to see the light of day, doesn't it?"

"Not a chance. The US interfering with foreign affairs about a weapon that shouldn't exist and has been kicked around in some form or another since Big Boss's days as a mercenary doesn't seem like it has a chance in hell of ever getting the attention it'd need for dismantling."

"It raises questions about your government that no one's particularly interested in answering. Still, isn't there something we can do before…?" She mimed blowing up with her hands and small accompanying sound effect.

Snake looked displeased about it being 'his government,' but didn't fault her logic. He had paused, looking at her with some degree of visible sympathy. "I know how you feel, but if this thing gets off the ground, the Big Five just became the Big Six."

"The US, Britain, France, China, and Russia aren't all nuclear powers."

"No, but they're at the big kid's table. If a South American nation shows up with the biggest gun at the show, they have to let them speak. It's not dangerous on its own, but it sets a dangerous precedent, one North Korea has been attempting to prove for years."

"Power means diplomacy."

Snake nodded. To an extent, it was already true. "Proliferation died with the end of the Cold War, but we're about to enter another era of the nuclear age."

They went back and forth like that for a while. There was a lot of ground that laid in a nebulous grey area, ethically or otherwise, and she wasn't very keen on sabotage out and out, but if it came to that, it was something she was resolved to put forward if necessary. Snake seemed more convinced that it would boil down to not if but when, and how. She did not share his pessimism.

Periodically, she asked him more questions about Metal Gear, conceptually or otherwise. About his two previous outings against the superweapon, Outer Heaven's Uprising and the Zanzibar Disturbance. She'd never heard of either until he filled her in with its unpleasant details. The establishment of a mercenary dispatch nation, The Outer Heaven Mother Company, its fall, the sudden influx of mercenary groups spread across the globe in the late nineties. Again, she found it as terrifying as riveting in its grotesquerie.

She also allowed bits and pieces of her own past to leak out, at his slight prodding. A bottle of red wine passed between them helped somewhat, to be certain. There was a great deal of it he already knew, which she thought was cheating, and said as much.

"Cheating? What do you mean?"

Lara had laughed. Midnight was a blur speeding closer all the time. "The things I've done don't really involve heroism no one can ever hear of."

Snake had waved off this claim with his hand, like she'd produced something nascent. "Hero's a strong word. I just got blackballed into doing something nobody else would, that's all," Snake said. Before she could protest, he refilled her glass. "And no more of that hero stuff, I got enough of that shit from Meryl."

Again, laughter. "Modesty's not becoming of you, Snake," she said. "It doesn't matter. You're cheating because if you open up an internet search, there's always some busybody prattling about something I've done. Usually mistaking paleontological or archaeological terminology, at that. Or misquoting me directly."

"I can't imagine the trouble you have sleeping at night, not being quoted right in Newsweek."

"Oh ho, that's sarcasm, there's no end to your bad habits."

"C'mon," he said, "give me an example. It can't be that bad."

She cleared her throat. "Really, Snake, can't you take my word for it?" When he just met her stare with a smirk and raised, skeptical, eyebrow, she folded. "Fine. Once, I was talking to a journalist early on, before I knew better. The press are easily some of the hungriest scavengers on earth."

"You should see them at the White House Correspondent's Dinner."

"No doubt. So, I'm speaking to him, and he asks if it's difficult being a woman in my profession."

"So?"

"So, like a complete twit, I tell him I like it best hard. Didn't occur to rethink the phrasing until I got the newspaper the morning after."

The air hung silent for a moment.

Snake clicked his tongue. "Okay, I can see how you might have thought that one out better. Was it as bad as it sounds?"

"Worse. The road to hell is paved to journalists. I hope. I didn't hear the end of those jokes until almost two years later." She sipped at the wine he'd provided, eyes drawn consistently to the photos again. Anticipation had begun its slow burn.

"Really, I like what I do. Love it, in fact. There's nothing quite like not knowing whether or not you'll make it out of this one."

"Or in how many pieces," Snake said.

Lara tried not to glow. "Mhmm. It's scary, but that's part of the fun. I was in Nairobi a few years ago, a place not traditionally kind to women, or to whites, and the land there is beautiful. I think that's what I like most. When I'm alone, when there's just the dirt and the wind and the sky, it envelops me. The earth, I mean. The land. I can convince myself that one day everybody will figure out we're just part of one unified body."

"No East, no West," Snake said.

Lara concurred with a clink of glasses. "Being away from civilisation all the bloody time is just a fringe benefit."

Snake lifted his head, peered around the gently lit room. "You got anything to listen to around this place," Snake said, "Chamber music not withstanding."

Lara stood, extended her hand to him. He took it with less hesitation that she'd expected. "Follow me."

That had been an hour prior. It was already past the witching hour, and the moon was just a blued face behind cloudcover outside. The music room was broad, with a low roof, insulated walls like foam on the major surfaces, and a carefully maintained atmosphere.

"I didn't think you were much for music, Snake."

"I'm not, really. I didn't have a whole lot of it growing up, but there were almost six months of lessons when I was a kid."

"You," Lara glanced over her shoulder at him, "do not seem the sort inspired to hold court with tune."

"Hnh?"

"You don't seem like a bloke who likes song."

"Oh. Yeah, not really."

She laughed. "This was your idea, you know. If you want, we could go to the conservatory, although there's a few more things in there we could break if we weren't careful."

Snake was lounging on one long, leather couch, and seemed perpetually only mildly interested in his surroundings, as if they were a breed of some new plant that had only slightly different leaves. Lara was intent on finding something useful, and after placing a record on in the background, joined him on the leather cushions, the space between them bigger in her head than she had hoped.

Snake looked at a loss.

"You don't know what a conservatory is, do you, Snake?"

He shook his head. She giggled, biting one lip.

"Room full of plants," Lara said.

"Oh, is that the glass room on the side of the house? The greenroom?"

"Mhmm. So tell me about this music you were on about a bit ago?"

Snake shifted himself to face her a little more directly. "I was with my third family. They—"

"Third family?" Lara asked. "You mean you were a foster child."

He only gave a shrug. "Another in a series of reasons I never even thought Big Boss could be related to me, later in life. I remember noticing the resemblance, but…" When Lara didn't pry, Snake continued. "I had been there a few months, and they wanted to help me acclimate, so they tried music. I was about eight. After a lot of lessons, I think they understood it wasn't going to take."

"Oh, that's so sad. I mean, relatively, of course. I was never very musically gifted," Lara said.

"Really? I wouldn't have expected that."

She shrugged. "My mother insisted on a classical education," Lara said. "Math was never a very interesting topic, and I hadn't really discovered history yet, so my mum believed I might spread my wings with scales and pentameter. No such luck. After four lessons, I threw a tangerine at my music teacher's head after he said I was tone deaf and that was the end of it."

"Hum a few bars, I have to hear it."

"Oh, for god's sake, Snake."

"You owe me. All we talk about is me, anyway."

She did. Five notes. Snake seemed impressed until the last two, where she was first off key, then could not maintain the note. His expression indicated there was a foul scent.

"Do _not_ make faces!" Lara said, slapping at his hand. "I'm not doing you any more damn favours, I'll say that."

It was the last of their casual time together, and a memory that stuck out after the fact, a metric to weigh their other experiences.

The bomb.

Alaska.

Manhattan.

Lara felt something, maybe only in the trickery of her mind's retrospect, like déjà vu, as though it were inevitable that their lives would sour. But when Snake started laughing, Lara joined him. That was what she remembered best.

His laughter, like a stones shuffling on a riverbed, and the closeness of her body to his.


	10. PART ONE: CHAPTER 5

When they got to New York, they had already spent a week preparing.

Much of the rest of the time before their departure was spent separate, adjourning only for rest at her small flat kept in the city, a loft with three bedrooms up seven of the building's eight stories. Snake would venture off into the city with another goal every day, and come back usually with some new bits of paper or varied paperwork. He had been expanding his network of contacts, he told her, from the people he'd worked with Stateside and might be counted on to help them. The news was generally bleak: almost invariably, when Snake returned he had only news that he was not welcomed, and on more than one occasion, tales that his attempted contact was no longer among the living. On the latter, Snake was taciturn and open at once, not eager to regale her with information but seeing fit to make some sort of informal eulogising information regardless. There was one of the former operatives he'd worked with during a brief stint inside the American Central Intelligence Agency, a man he only referred to as Vincent, a former commanding officer, et al. Of the almost ten people he'd attempted to contact, six of them were dead. Lara felt some desire to comfort him, in spite (or because of) his disinterest in sympathy, but had nothing to offer save apologies. He did, however, have a video conference with Otacon during that time that lent them some basic comfort. They would be arriving in New York to a building they owned, legally and wholly, after some renovations.

And, twice, Snake disappeared in the city until late in the night. He offered no explanation as to where he went, and Lara asked for none.

During that week, Lara met with the publisher who had expressed interest, head of MEGASURPRISE LLC. She was surprised by their odd publishing schedule, the strange format they seemed to operate under, with its vague notions of releasing titles only in certain months of the year. Overall she understood it would be on the fringe of a release world, so she also contacted her publisher, and attempted a sort of roundabout bargain: Lara would agree to almost any interview, with any publication or news programme, with the understanding that in exchange, they would make some sort of coverage for Nastasha's book at some point. By the Sunday after their arrival stateside, there was a release date, Nastasha was in contact with an editor and the managing editor for nonfiction releases, and Lara had tenuous appointments on major networks months in advance. It was one hurdle that mercifully could be relegated to the backburner of their concerns, major hurdles not withstanding. In that time, she had a conversation over the phone with Nastasha, before she and Snake met for dinner later that night.

"How's things? States treating you well?" Lara asked.

"California is always pretty. It is somewhat monotonous." Lara laughed at Nastasha's remark. "I spoke with your people about the schedule. I am actually impressed, I did not expect such a… expedited resourcefulness of you."

"I'll take that as a compliment, thank you, but they're really not my people. I just knew somebody who knew somebody, that's all," Lara said. She could hear through the slightly askew muffling of Nastasha's voice there was a cigarette dangling precariously from one lip corner. "We'll e headed to New York tomorrow, will you be there to greet us?"

"I trust you and Snake have not had much friction?" Nastasha said.

"No, not at all, actually." Lara was holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, looking out over the blooming field of emerald blades before they gave way to a line of trees on the grounds overskirts. "Should we have?"

"Well, I would not say that. Perhaps only I meant he is… rough. Do you understand?"

Lara thought of Snake's willingness to vanish without notice. Or the insomnia she had come to notice as not an exception but the rule to his sleeping habits. "I think so. No, he's actually been quite the gentleman." She thought of his drinking habits. "Within reason."

"Mm, I am glad. Snake can be a strange man for some, but a good man."

"I can't believe he put all this together."

"It is really only Otacon and him. I have spoken with the good doctor, actually. I hear Bolivia is in the cards, so to speak?"

Lara nodded absentmindedly. "It is. I'm having a few of my personal supplies shipped to the states for use, and once we're settled in, we'll head south again, to Brazil."

Lara glanced at the clock, and rounded out the conversation.

On the occasions where they had brief dinner conversation, she tugged at jagged shards of his past and smoother ones of her own. They spoke of his time in FOXHOUND, of infiltrating and destroying Big Boss's two strongholds. Of her time during various digs and excavations, some of them adventures of a sort. She felt only mildly self-conscious admitting to a desire for thrillseeking, considering her company. When she let slip some of the more unusual circumstances surrounding a few of her outings, she was surprised by the lack of skepticism. She asked him if he believed in the supernatural, which was met as "not really."

"I used to think science can't do everything, but the older I get, the less I believe it," he said, during one of two dinners they had at her home. He was smoking with his meal, veal served with Viennese artichokes.

"That's not much of an answer," she said.

"Well, I guess I believe there's enough that isn't known to keep an open mind. How's that?"

"As diplomatic an answer as any I've heard."

Snake took a deep drag from his cigarette, cherry blooming and waning. "Fine, fine, sure. I've seen too much weird crap to say anything else, I suppose. Why?"

She told him of times in the Amazon. Of creatures without genus she could identify, or animals that had been extinct and were not. She did it casually, glancing over some degree of their specificity. He listened, intent as usual, without comment.

"So why bring it up, Lara?"

"Because I felt if you trusted me, I owed you something."

When they abdicated for the night, the last day at her mansion, Lara thought again of asking him to spend more time with her. Earlier that evening, she had left the room for her library after a talk of archaeological work, and in the reflection of a polished brazier mounted on a pedestal in the corner of the room she caught his stare at her behind while she walked off. She felt a pleasant surge of giddiness, and a quiet abashedness that she would have never admitted to if confronted. If it had been anyone else, she might have made some flippant comment, but she thought better of it considering her own gentle leering when he came back from a run covered in sweat. But his aloofness when the end of the evening made her self conscious, disinterested and closemouthed he often seemed.

Then there were those sullen disappearances late at night, in the city.

On the day of departure, riding to the airport, they rode in silence to the airstrip. Otacon had asked if it would be possible to get him out, which she arranged with a phone call or two, and had insisted on paying for airfare. It was the first and one of few instances where money became a concern, and Lara asked outright what their desire for "financial assistance" might entail, since they both had insisted paying for everything with few exceptions (and Snake taking care of lunch even in advance, a gentlemanly gesture that surprised her.)

"Well, I hadn't really thought about it, I guess."

"Then may I make a suggestion?"

"Sure."

"If it is something I will use, need, or might need, let me pay for it." She thought harder on this for a moment. "Or plane-sized."

And that was as much as they ever referred to money.

The buildings sprawled in every direction. The island itself held itself to the mainland via connective tissue as metal sinew propping it close, the strands of clogged arterial roadways and runnels of concrete as methods in and out. She had seen it before, would see it again, but as a woman, she found it amazing in its scope. The great silver liquid sheets that reflected the sky, the stone and the people, their edifices of brilliant glass like blown vision into the mouth of civilisation. She felt a portent of its great scale, thought it appropriate they would find bedding there. Lara knew there was a limit to it, but she liked it almost as much a cliff face's stoicism, as the armies of treebranches and leaves that could call out to her like a billion souls. This was a world filled with souls, and she took it in with great care, observing its wonder, its power. From her height in the plane, she saw only the black, grey, gunmetal and silver lines and plates of tectonic industry that had been made in such a short time. There was too much for her to take in. The worlds of strangled space, encompassing and freeing and crowding. Rooftops like lillypads, buildings with scaffolds and sheets and twilit electronic screens flickering and dancing. Elsewhere, the scabbed land of tenements and colourful arched stone parks with basketball courts and littered playgrounds. She thought of New York's scrappiness, and it reminded her how rarely she ventured to America. The majesty of stone classical escarpments that held warm familiarity for her would be absent for a long time, instead replaced by the city and region's numbing ligaments of paved lines and steel suspension bridges like tendons running out to forever.

New York's brilliant size wowed her, but as she recalled its people well, she felt no great loss for their company. They made her feel like a breed of bug, girls half her age with phones almost literally surgically fused with cellphones to their face, people who refused to look at her, businesswomen and men who might break people in half for a taxi. They reminded Lara of the money people in England whom she detested, and of why she wanted as little to do with that money as possible. And when she left its business districts, far from Rockefeller plaza and attempted to venture into some heart of life, she saw the lines dividing her class and those with less, and she ached for a better country. They made her think of her own unearned wealth, and thought of the ruins of lands hidden by hundreds of years with great yearning. Years prior, she recalled Co-Op city's blasted out hopelessness and felt vague disgust for Park Avenue's grotesqueries.

The apotheosis of American civilisation made her recall with vivid familiarity why she so rarely visited.

The day prior had been without tumult. A small airstrip she personally chartered out of the UK, to Switzerland, where they reboarded a jet she had waiting. When he produced false identification papers, she made no comment. It was the only noteworthy aspect of their transfer, with her excitement unfortunately truncated by the tediousness of its impractical transit. The ride was boring in its duration, with Lara embroiled in the mobile pad Otacon had continued his update with and Snake sleeping for most of the time aboard. She noticed he had a preternatural ability to sleep on command at almost any time save when it might be normal to do so.

On their approach to the continent, and then the city, Lara moved to a window seat of the cabin, its plush acoutrements only serving to realign some of her nascent distaste for currency and her own lush economics. She ruminated again on a previous visit to New York's less pleasant boroughs, knowing the charities she supported were never enough.

"Have you been here before?" Snake said, jarring her out of her memories. She hadn't realised Snake had awoken.

"Mm, sorry? Oh, yes. Once or twice." She continued gazing outwards. "It's so large."

"Yeah. I was here one time before, almost ten years back. I'd just joined the CIA, and they flew me out to meet with some guys. Turned out to be a waste of time." He took a seat facing opposite her, began a survey of the window's view. "You okay?"

"Yes." She cleared her throat. "Yes, Snake, thank you." She paused. Thought better of her response. "I think I've done things that mattered before, but… Money's fickle."

"Yeah."

For a moment, he was silent.

"You're not, though. You do good."

"Snake, we hardly know one another. You don't know how I might spend my money. You don't know if I do good."

"Sure I do."

"How?"

"Intuition." And after that, he had nothing more to say on the topic.

Surprisingly, she felt calmed.


	11. PART ONE: CHAPTER 6

It was two weeks before their building was ready.

During that time, Snake all but disappeared.

Lara corresponded with Nastasha from a penthouse

Otacon kept the three of them up to date, consumed by a series of paper distractions and forms that required I's dotted and T's crossed.

"Not much for social graces, is he?" Lara remarked to Otacon once, fully aware she was asking a saint if he owned a bible.

"A lot of us were already shuffling off our old lives, I guess." They were communing over a small café in downtown. Suits rustled past. "He wasn't. Alaska's almost five thousand miles away."

Lara wondered about her own life, and when she might return to England. Or to a more welcoming environ, like the Serengeti.

It turned out to be a very, very long time.

* * *

"I'm impressed."

Lara and Otacon jumped.

They were standing in the entrance hall of a small white-brick building off the waterfront, off FDR Drive. The room was high-ceiling and spacious as it was spare, with concrete support pillars in the middle of the room that ascended up to the second floor, a staircase in one corner with plain white ceramic tilings. The floor was buffed stainless steel, with more stainless steel paneling offering as trim on the edges of most of the surfaces and metal grating as shelving units mounted on the walls. Beyond an open doorway, and she spotted the vague booths of what looked like a firing range. A polished silver pole ran down from the second floor in the corner of the room, near the wetwall's circular staircase. Everything seemed to offer a dull glimmer of metallic professional utilitarianism.

"Good Lord, Snake." Lara's hand went to her throat. Snake had appeared behind both of them, voice catching the faintest echo in the space. Lara had been running a hand over a nearby desk with matte black finish and Otacon at her side when Snake had placed a hand on Lara's shoulder, causing her to slam the drawer she'd opened.

"Heaven forbid you enter a room like a normal person. Jeez." Otacon's face had emptied of his normal skin tone, ran a hand through his hair, checked his glasses.

Snake shrugged an apology. "It's perfect," he said. "What's on second?"

Otacon was regaining his colour. "Go check for yourselves. Down the hall is your weird shooting gallery. Just do me a favour and don't go all trigger happy when I'm asleep, okay?"

When Lara turned from the desk to follow Snake upstairs, she wasn't surprised to see him lighting a cigarette. "What do you mean," Snake said, smoke dangling precariously as he produced a plain metal lighter. "you're going to live here?"

Otacon was having to call up as they ascended. "Where else was I going to go? Rent in this city is ridiculous, and it's not exactly like we're being paid." And as they disappeared, she heard Otacon say, "Hey, do me a favour, take that stupid thing away from him! That's sensitive equipment up there!"

Once Lara had topped the staircase, she took observation of the myriad tools present, forgetting Otacon's request for the time being. There was a hallway on one side of the room, over the first floor's firing range. One wall of the central room was lined with firearms of a ridiculous variety, sitting on metal pegboard slots and hung like murderous trophies. Assault rifles, submachine guns, pistols, sniper rifles. She spotted two AK variants, a Colt, a Mauser, three or four Chinese Type variants. All of them looked polished well maintained. Below the wall of death were metal ammunition boxes, with spray-painted gauges and chamber numbers. In the furthest corner, she also noticed the varied bit of odd ends she had requested, and other non-lethal implements. Flares, magnetic grapples, a small glass-enclosed device that looked like a motherboard, and a pair of lockers embossed with Otacon's idea of a joke: "HIS," and "HERS." When she opened hers, she found a small array of clothes that she had shipped over from Britain and provided to the address Otacon had provided earlier in the week.

Opposite what she would consider their side of the room was Otacon's array of technology, a console with almost five monitors all wired to a central stablising computer, and a series of broken parts on a desk without space to spare, its surface area consumed by the cannibalised bits of electronic organs and computer strands. Motherboards lay about like refuse from an autopsy, half-soddered fuses and CPU squares stacked together. There was a grounding pad underneath the work area so as to remove the chance of an errant current destroying what could be months of work, she was sure. There were firewire chords like tentacles dangling over a carefully arranged hook system, with its other attachment heads available, including what looked like an air-drill with co2 cartridge for its chief motor drive. There was also an exhaustive set of drawers built into the wall, and the glass faces of them showed their innards as being composed entirely of mechanical tissue not yet used. All this was illuminated by bright white fluorescents overhead, spaced at perfect intervals. It was a necessity, as there were no windows; fresh brick and mortar overlaid their gaps. With two walls in use or covered, and one spare, the last was consumed by a massive flat screen that held only on its display a logo, a Japanese portmanteau.

Lara drank it all in, thought of all the work Otacon must have employed to make it a reality, how every corner and space was used for something.

She quickly snatched the cigarette from Snake's mouth and stamped it on the ground.

"—The hell—"

"None of that. Awful bloody smell, anyway," Lara said. Snake looked deflated, and she walked to the wall of firearms. "And you had the audacity to harass me about my toys? Good god, you own too many guns."

"How did you know I own these?" Snake was eying the ruins of his cigarette on the floor.

Lara picked up one of the pistols, and said, "Because Otacon doesn't own any, and most of these are custom. This 1911 is a thin-frame for lighter handling, the top of the slide is serrated to limit glare during aiming, and the handle's got a tapered cut for easier reloading. I wouldn't expect anybody who didn't know their way around a pistol to modify their weapon like that."

When Snake looked impressed, she tried her best not to beam.

Otacon was had just mounted the staircase's apex. "He had me ship his weapons out here from a storage place up in Anchorage. I don't think we'll get a lot of use out of them."

"I hope not," Snake said.

"Agreed," Lara said. "Guns are fun, being shot at isn't. If I may be so bold, this place isn't just altered, it's almost built from the ground up. How did you get this done so fast, Hal?"

He shrugged and took a seat at his console. Snake was crouched on an ammo box, and Lara took a lean-to on one of the lockers. "Actually, I had already drummed up plans for an engineer out here almost a month ago. I had to modify the blueprints for the floorplan, and since this is a converted firehouse, we figured it'd do more than suit our plans. Originally we had a much larger place in mind out of a warehouse, and we do have a dock a mile or so up the road, but…" Otacon trailed off. "You weren't talking about any of this, were you."

Lara smiled crookedly, arms crossed over her chest. "Afraid not. Sorry Hal."

Otacon nodded. "Well, Snake fronted most of the money."

They both looked at him. Snake was dancing a cigarette between his fingers. "What?"

"Well," Lara said. "For starters, I don't know how you managed what is probably thousands and thousands of custom remodeling, real estate in New York, or all of Hal's equipment."

Snake only raised an eyebrow. The two men exchanged looks.

"Come on, boys. Don't you think it's a bit late to hold out on me?"

Snake sighed. "I, uh, had some money squirreled away. From my days as a merc."

"You were a mercenary? Is this… blood money we're talking about?"

Snake shook his head. "Not quite. After I left the CIA in the mid nineties, I got a few job offers. If I thought it was worth it, I took the job. I'm no hitman, though. A lot of it was escorting work for suits going to military sites, or helping train grunts for rent-a-war assholes." Snake jerked his head in Lara's direction. "Your country hires more guns for hire than any other, you know. Britain's paid a lot of money to get Mantis LLC to help their troops in Iraq."

Lara shook her head. "Nuh uh, no getting off the topic that easy. You mean Philanthropy's coming out of your pocket? What other type of jobs were you lending your _talents_ toward?"

Snake shrugged. "It had to. Besides, I just stockpiled the money after I had cost of living taken care of. I wasn't really interested in doing more than keeping my mind off Africa, and Zanzibar. After Moses, it seemed like as good a use as any." Snake hesitated, knowing there was another question at play here. "I never murdered anybody for money, if that's what this is about. We've got the same work ethic."

"Shoot second, but make sure you're a better shot than the other gent," Lara said.

Snake nodded. He seemed thankful the topic appeared closed, so Lara returned to the other subject at hand. "Mantis LLC?"

Otacon shrugged. "I've heard of them, but man. I didn't know that they were helping stock the war." He turned to Lara. "Praying Mantis is a private military contractor that provides armed personnel on a for-hire basis. I know some people who'd put the number of personel on the ground at almost a hundred and fifty thousand."

"Good lord." She turned to Snake. "And you used to work for these people?"

Snake shook his head. "No, not Mantis. They're a new upstart, but they just got a DOD contract that'll make them one of the ten leading suppliers as of 2008. I did work for a company out of Montreal that folded when they got sold to Blackwater LLC a few years back. There's a reason I don't do that sort of work anymore, not for almost six years."

"Right." She paused, thought on it. "I'm sorry, Snake. Your past is your past. So, then." She looked at the monitor on the main wall. "I believe Bolivia was on the agenda when you called, Hal?"

"It was. Here's how much we know." Otacon threw a small breaker beneath his desk, and the other two turned to the central display.

Nothing happened.

"Uh, Hal?"

"Oh, shoot. Give me a sec." He began typing on the computer. "Oh, there we go. Here."

The screen lit up a satellite image of the area's topography, a rich ocean of green clouds with colours tracing verdant outlines around patches of beige and creamy agricultural squares. The region was secluded from La Paz, Bolivia's nearest megalopolis, and the nearest highway was hardly within walking distance. "Not quite the limousine ride we were all expecting, I'm sure. What's our goal, then?"

"Well," Otacon said, pressing his glasses up again. "You two have seen those photos. If I had to hazard a guess, The Boys of Che have got hold of REX's data, or something like it. The idea is for you guys to get in and out with proof, and with that thing out of commission. I'm going to put you in touch with a Brasilian escort who's been staying in a small village a ways east of Rurrenabaque."

"Rurre? Hal, there's nothing there. And this," she waved her hand over the area of the map he'd pointed out. "is hardly the region you're talking about."

"That's your ultimate destination, yeah. Or generally speaking."

Snake was lighting another cigarette. "'Generally speaking'?"

Otacon sighed. "Yeah, I know. There's not much I can do if I'm going to try and keep you guys out of La Paz, which could be a problem. Rurrenebaque isn't exactly a major city, but in tourist season, they see enough travelers, so you two won't stand out nearly as much. And heading east from the west is easier, as far as avoiding the authorities are concerned."

"Why is that an issue?" Lara said.

Snake took a deep drag of his cigarette, and ignored Otacon's frowning. "Because if they see a couple of Westerners come in with jeeps and guns, we'll get told to go home."

"Best case scenario is they tell you guys to go home, yeah. In fact-" Otacon sat at his terminal and began typing. Another pair of images overlaid themselves on the central screen. "Hey. Take a look at this." The image presented was the grainy photo they'd seen before. "This is what you guys saw before, but last night, I got something a little bigger. I haven't watched it yet because until a few minutes ago, I hadn't been able to get the power working in here." Otacon pressed a key, and the second image began to play. It was a video, and a timer on the lower right notified its length at less than two minutes.

As it started, there was hardly much present. Just a green blur of a poorly-shot camera video, someone's bare feet, and a voice.

"That's Movima," Lara said.

"A variant of Spanish?" Otacon said from his desk.

She shook her head. "No. Hardly anybody speaks it. That narrows down who—"

Snake waved his arm and barked. "Quiet!"

The video's frame moved to peer upwards. A low sound like rain ran in the background, but was otherwise almost silent. It must have been early morning, because although the video's quality was low from a light-enhancing lens's application, it was an odd middle ground of illumination. An indigenous person's head stepped in from of the camera, facing away from them. His bare shoulders moved away from their perspective of whomever was holding the camera. The native moved aside branches, dignified in his caution, and looked back to the "director." He pointed beyond the brush.

There was a great hulking pair of legs beyond the tree, its branches, the native. They were rectangular, two great columns of metal attached to a thinner sort of joint, reverse-knee, like a bird, or a canine. The structure, still half-completed but with progress the previous photo hadn't hinted at, was still supported by a webworm of girders and struts. The two of them were attached to a torso of a sort, with a waist like a series of octagonal plates.

"That's an armor skirting," Otacon said. "I thought about implementing one on REX before we figured out its armaments didn't match its defenses, so—"

The speaker in the video was American tinged in his accent, swearing once, then twice, at the sight presented. "If you get this video, please make sure it's copyrighted to me, so none of those travelogue bastards poach it. I'll stream this to you." The camera recording beeped. "I've worked too hard to let some—"

The head of the native snapped backward, and in the greenish gray of the lowlight lens, the blood erupting from his head caught the light like white liquid blowing out from his spinal column. Gunfire reports seemed to come in as an afterthought, cracks as flat as they were loud.

Lara covered her mouth, thought she said "Oh my god," but couldn't be sure.

Otacon turned away.

Snake only winced, gritted his teeth.

Lara forced herself to look back at the video.

The American directing the video took a shaky step backwards, almost dropped the camera, recovered. The native's body had fallen towards him, crumpling as a puppet would after being freed from its wires. The director began a litany of prayers, and turned to run.

A man with an AK stared at the man, whose profane terror ended upbruptly. The beret-clad soldier took aim.

The video ended.

They were silent for a long time, the recording having left only a black screen.

It was Lara who spoke first.

"Tell me how and what to do to stop it."


	12. PART ONE: CHAPTER 7

The city was the most beautiful at night, she thought. Almost like it could be civilised.

There were whole massive edifices that had no peak. Many were lit up in the enscarpments of concrete, their hard edges of silken grey or glimmering titanium awnings like blades that ended whole massive columns, stones terminating in glass or steel. There were a sea of lit squares and glass boxes to fill the world. It reflected the sky in brilliant replica, the overhang of distant stars dimmed by the brilliance of the city's myriad hum of coloured lights, some azure, gold, white, red. Colours upon colours of tinted glass gazed back at her on the building faces that had no enmity nor favour. At best, she could imagine perhaps commerce, or perhaps the lives of those across the river, whom she found herself not envious of, but some mixture of pity, or despair. The structures that surrounded her, the river between the world of skyscrapers and tenements and apartments and flat lofts that she had only the barest understanding of.

Perhaps it surprised her, lost in the considerations of the sensation she had accustomed to herself amidst ancient foliage and more natural life, that again, Snake had appeared among her without notice, and when she turned and saw him without feeling his presence, she did not notice apprehension in her despite the abruptness.

Lara had been standing on the roof for a length of time unknown to her. The rest of the night prior was a series of practical concerns. Originally, Otacon had planned on staying behind at their new headquarters, and at the insistence of Snake no less, but Otacon had made his case to the both of them that, weather conditions being haphazard and this being their first outing, it might be best if he was at least locally capable of contact. Staying behind in the States was almost entirely out of the question. Rurrenabaque seemed likely.

All their talk after that had been deflated of mirth, with few exceptions. Otacon did a moment or two of preening, with regards to the building's outfittings, including two bedrooms (if a room, a cot, a pillow and blanket could indeed be called a bedroom,) a kitchenette downstairs, and a water closet on each floor. There was roof access from the stairwell, terminating in the second floor with a wall-mounted ladder leading to a small hatch that opened out. Lara was sure she'd stay at the building, with little doubt being cast by Snake and Otacon.

An early evening had been called, and Otacon mentioned having a lot of digital prepwork that needed taking care of, figuratively speaking. Lara said she'd turn in early then, and Snake mentioned being back later in the evening, with Otacon's approval that a more thorough discussion and briefing could be accomplished en-route, once travel arrangements were made. So Lara went down the hall to her meager accommodations, cot with canvass and small folding chair for a desk next to it. She found Otacon had already taken her shipment of spare attire and left it in the room, so she changed into light cotton pants and a sleeveless top before bed.

She dozed. Lara had lain on the cot, metal rods unpleasant and not conducive to anything restful, for more time than she should have before getting up again.

Once insomnia had asserted itself and she'd given up on worthwhile repose, Lara made for the "living room," finding Otacon still at his desk, typing hurriedly, the various monitors the only source of light and his attention embroiled in the numerous windows they each possessed. Deciding company had no allure, she went for the roof.

She crunched on the gravel, barefooted but not pained. White bricks lay the work for the roof's trim, and she sat down on it, listening to the air currents of cars, the embers and cracklings of the city's nightlife.

"How long have you been creeping about here?"

Snake shrugged at her. "Just a little while. I got back almost half an hour ago."

"Then what are you doing up here?"

Snake gently shook a pack of cigarettes in his palm. "Relax. Otacon heard me come in, started complaining about the smell." He took one to his lips, lit it, and drew in deeply. She had to admit, he made the habit seem incredibly alluring. At least until she caught whiff of the miserable aroma it produced.

"The smell of you or those awful things?"

"Funny. What are you doing out here?" Snake looked out on the city, stood next to her, let the wind talk for a time.

"Lara."

She looked at him.

"It's the video, isn't it?"

She only nodded. She felt her body betray her, eyes begin stinging, chest grow tight, and refused to speak.

Snake flicked his cigarette off the roof.

She let his hand fall on her shoulder and squeeze the flesh gingerly.

"I can't tell you anything comforting. I'm sorry."

She nodded.

"That's not going to be the last time we see something like that."

She nodded again.

"Snake, I'll do what I have to. But this is different than what I'm used to, that's all. Not by much, but… it feels separate, somehow."

"Hey," Snake said. "What is it exactly you do again?"

She laughed. "You're terrible. Have you ever been the only living person within a hundred miles in any direction?"

He shook his head.

"It's remarkably exhilarating. You'd be shocked how invigorating it can be to be the first human to see something in thousands of years, or be completely cut off from the outside world and be perfectly at ease with it. I've spent a lifetime uncovering things others can't, or won't, and doing my best to be someone who'll find where we're going by where we've been."

"A good strategy."

"Maybe. I like it a lot. I lost my parents in an accident, when I was still a teenager. Did you know that?"

He shook his head.

"My father was a great man. He taught me a good deal about history, about archaeology. The rest I picked up at University, but it wasn't the same. I've spent a lot of time since wondering whether or not it was time wasted, looking so much on the past. I wonder if he would have made different choices if he had known about the accident ahead of time. I spend so much of my time doing the same thing, wondering if it's a loop, if he wondered about his own obsession with bygone eras that there's nothing for him in the present." She hesitated. "Snake, can I tell you something?"

"Like what?"

"A few years ago," Lara said, and brushed a strand of hair out of her face, hoping he wouldn't notice the quick swipe at the corner of her eye, ridding herself of the moisture there. "I was in North Africa. I'd been recovering relics related to the boy king of Egypt."

"Tutankhamun?"

"You're old drinking mates I take it?" Lara pretended she didn't notice Snake rolling his eyes. "Regardless, I'd gotten a call that mentioned there might be something to be found, and even though the Egyptian officials squelshed things a bit, I was still able to have a few nights in a catacomb or such out there. Do you know what I saw?" Lara looked back out to the city. Lights blinked on and off, people drifted down the street, a boat passed in the harbor. There were the dwindling lives of people for whom midnight was not the end of something but the start.

"What, Lara? What did you find? What did you see?" Snake spoke softly, almost like an afterthought.

"I had spent half a week trying to find an entrance into what I thought was going to be something great, or wondrous. I'd uncovered antiquities in the region before, great emeralds inlaid upon dais made of ivory and gold and the most fragile sandstone. But that wasn't what was there. I finally got inside, and just found swords. And bones. Lots of bones."

"Snake, I saw how little we'd changed," she said.

Snake said nothing.

Lara thought of trying to explain the shattered marrow, the blown-out casts of shields that had been pierced by arrow-fire, or the caved in helmets that had been left to rust in the half-collapsed foyer of a much large construct, lost to a cave-in many years past. All that remained was room after room of massive stone blocks and broken skeletons, armaments, shattered weaponry that had been used up and discarded when it failed.

She had found a massacre.

"You should go to bed."

"What do you think's going to happen in Bolivia?"

Lara met his gaze again.

"I think there's going to be shooting. And death."

Snake nodded.

"Snake, where do you go every other night? Wandering off when you think nobody's paying attention?"

One eyebrow up, he looked mildly shocked. "I guess I'm not used to there being anyone around to notice."

Somewhere, a car alarm went off. A bicyclist ducked out of an alley, jumped on, sped off.

"I walk around. Think. Smoke. It's not that exciting."

"It's more than that. I think you're avoiding the question."

"I think you should go to bed." He checked his watch, and, briefly, she saw something catch the orange light beneath its band, a discolouration of the skin. "And so should I. Otacon said we'd be leaving at seven in the morning."

Lara wanted to press the question, but Snake just turned, went to the ladder, and disappeared down its hatch.

* * *

"Snake!"

Lara heard, distantly in the halls of sleep, Otacon's voice calling out.

"Snake, get Lara! Hurry!"

There was only the briefest pause between when she understand the communication and when she heard the pounding on the door to her room, limited it might be. She heard him on the other side, and as she drifted upwards out of the vague haze of melatonin's underworld. Rythmically, she felt it could not have been dawn out.

Then she heard his voice in a way she hadn't before, and his fist pounding against the metal.

"Lara, we need you out here!"

She did not hear him so much as feel the timbre of his roughly grained voice, washing over her like ice water. She smelled something like cordite, or wood. When she bolted out of bed, she was peripherally aware of the humidity that had accumulated on her skin, and the sweatiness of her body, and the cool cement and porcelain tiles of her surroundings offering no comfort.

She swung her door open, and Snake had already gone to the central space, with its monitors aglow even from down the hall. As she snapped out of the room and quickened to them both, she heard a flurry of telecasted voices surround her as she entered the room's centre.

On one side, there was Snake, peering at the monitor that glared with myriad faces scowling at them, each one from the shoulders up, and with earpieces glued to one ear. They were a mix of men and women, almost all white, sitting in front of desks, and their voices comingled in a way that she couldn't make sense of, the volume turned too low and their speech much too similar in tone and in pentameter. Their authorial presence as newscasters was undercut by the strange supercilious manner with which they were presented, surrounded by graphs of bright colours, neon articles of bars and pie charts.

At the other side of the room was Otacon, digits bashing like a piano's hammers mashing its string bridge, madly burying himself in work she did not understand in the slightest, lines upon lines of information reamed out before him on the multiple screens presented. He was sweating, and looked haggard, with the tightness of skin under his eyes having built from under his eyes. When he spoke, his normally soft voice was only concerned, with traces of fear.

Lara faced the both of them, feeling a low anxiety build somewhere in the nape of her neck, like something had been left to supercharge the air. "Hal, Snake, what is it? What's going on?"

"We've got a problem."

Otacon hit a key, and the volume bloomed rapidly.

"—Authorises use of—"

"—But left to the senate's intervention—"

"—Executive order—"

Lara looked from video to video, all displayed on the main screen, one loverlaid the next. In the bottom, Lara read off the news ticker Otacon had displayed.

_U.S. Administration orders crackdown, aid for Bolivian government w/ regards to new coup. _

"Oh, no."

Lara hardly felt Snake's hand on her arm. "It gets worse. Take a look." Snake jerked his head at the screen, looking to his partner. "Otacon."

The volume rose while the other feeds receeded.

"—And with this emergency call for Senate approval, security contractors can be dispatched as soon as Monday, with security contractor Araignée unavailable for comment. This news comes rapidly, on the heels of this morning's broadcast that private—"

"Hal, the next feed, please."

Otacon muted one newscaster for the next, a woman whose thick accent and clipped speech seemed positively a-twitter with anticipation.

"Xe Services, a limited liability company based out of the southern United States, has mentioned that although they were beat to the punch for this new defense contract bid, they will still maintain a significant presence in the middle east and continue to explore merger opportunities."

Snake pointed to one window. "Otacon."

"—Which is why, with liberal America raging rampant, we need to show the citizens of Bolivia that the full force of the United States and its affiliates will completely—"

"Turn it off, Hal. Please."

Otacon muted all the video feeds, with Snake retracting his hand.

That, she noticed.

"Does this mean what I think it means, Hal? Did we just get blackballed out of making it into the border? Why are troops being sent in by the states? Is this one of those hired gun groups you two were talking about?"

"Blackballed, maybe not, but otherwise, you got it, yeah." Snake said. "The US has hired a bunch of bastards to do their dirty work for them. Araignée's based out of France, and it's one of the new blood who're trying to compete with standing armies for manpower and battlefield presence." He was moving to the lockers on the opposite side of the room. He began pulling out items and clothing that Lara had little interest in discerning; she joined him, at her own locker.

"How much time does this give us, lads?" She asked, periodically glancing at the moving mouthpieces of the media at large.

"At most? Three hours to get off the ground." Otacon had turned back to typing as well as talking to them both. "Lara, I don't follow politics, so I'm only getting this in fits and starts. I know right now if we don't touch soil inside of twenty hours, we're not making it in Bolivia without a lot of trouble." Otacon began yanking out drawers from his desk, rifling through them for a variety of cables, cherry picking from each and separating them.

Lara was pulling out a pair of cargo shorts and roughshod boots. "When you say 'without a lot of trouble', what do you mean."

Behind her, Snake slid a clip of rounds into his .45, and pulled the slide back with a click.

"Oh," she said.

"There's another problem, too," Snake said. He had already begun loading up a large suitcase full of items, and was sealing it shut. "If the US is hiring a security firm to help Bolivian military contend with that group, then getting out of the country's going to be even worse."

Otacon nodded. He'd yanked free a small tablet computer, strapped on a wearable to one arm that he hid over one white labcoat sleeve over the top of a thin t-shirt, and flipped closed a laptop before loading all of it into a metal suitcase identical to Snake's. "Yeah, I don't know what to do for us, there. We might end up stuck there for a while. Think the both of you can stomach an extended vacation?"

"Bolivia's lovely if you can find a place to stay, Hal. Besides, you blokes are too serious. We'll be fine." She was lacing up a pair of boots, the last in a series of wardrobe adjustments. Neither men had any time to note her lack of modesty in the sudden change of attire she'd undergone. Otacon hadn't even noticed, between his head buried in the monitors and then in packing. Lara decided not to comment on the glances at her behind Snake had made, obvious or otherwise. "What incites this, anyway? Is this because of the Boys of Che?"

"The same. Here." Before pulling the plug on the last of the active computer resources, he clicked his touchpad twice, three times, and audio began to play in a rough Portuguese. The man speaking sounded rough, stern, and with only the musical inflections the language lent his cadence. After a minute or two, it was finished, the silence left behind broken by the computer's automated "goodbye" chime.

"The two of you want to translate that for me? I caught every other word." Snake was loading a handful of empty clips and then carefully placing them into a titanium carrying case.

Otacon glanced at Snake sheepishly. "I actually already translated it, so I couldn't tell you exactly."

Lara's voice was clear, her enunciation precise, flowing, beautiful. Bilabial sounds became buoyant, flouncy, and she made the language sound otherworldly in its florid simplicity. Her English accent did it a service. "O nosso governo, a nossa vida. Não temos exigências, mas temos um futuro. Vamos fazer um futuro. Fixar as armas, e a floresta não vai comer o seu corpo. Este lagarto trará uma nova nação."

Snake and Otacon stopped, stared at her.

"Our government, ourselves. We demand nothing, but a future. We will make a future. Give up your arms, and the forest will not devour your flesh. This lizard will birth our new country." When they continued to look at her, she brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "Boys, you're making me blush. Do you think it's cryptic enough?"

"Cryptic enough to start a shootout at the American embassy."

Lara and Snake both gaped at Otacon. He looked ashen, and very, very scared.

"It followed the release of the Boys of Che's declaration earlier this morning. About the time we went to bed, actually," Otacon said. "The embassy's in La Paz. They ran in, shot half of the people there, then disbanded into the city. So far nobody's been caught, let alone injured, outside of diplomats or American nationals. "

Snake had begun moving their suitcases down the staircases. Lara had moved to follow suit, but Snake had already snagged hers. "Thank you. Hal, that speaks very specifically of a show of force, if you asked an amateur. Can we get inside? How are going to get there?"

"About the time Snake was waking you up, I made us arrangements. We've got a chartered flight, and we have less than two hours to get on board."

They finished up whatever small methods they could manage to put together, and took a vehicle Otacon had arranged to pick them up, with a second vehicle arriving solely for their multitude of supplies, and by the time they departed, they found the early morning traffic to be monstrous in size, lines upon lines of vehicles stretching out into infinite black rows laid before them, turning and winding through. They had to escape New York initially, heading for a private airport just on the other side of the river. The ride was long, featured by a cross of the bridge over a massive suspension bridge that led them away from the cacaophonous wonder of skyscraping metalglass needles biting at the clouds and coming dawn.

Their ride was chauffeured by a driver in a compartment completely cut off from their cabin, a sort of soundproofed private sedan, non descript to the outsider but otherwise luxuriantly upholstered.

During the wait of the ride, Lara felt the adrenaline continue its slow dissolve into her bloodstream like flashpowder making her muscles ache for movement, tension, release. There was only the low hum of the car's velocity, well above the speed limit. 70, 80 KPH seemed like the distant past. When she looked at Snake, she could see the hushed anticipation in him too. The thin hints of veins in his hand, his neck seemed more noticeable. His chest and shoulders seemed bigger, muscles tight against black shortsleeved shirt, eyes taking a determination and focus she'd never seen in him.

He looked like an animal keen to pace his cage until the door swung loose.

"Hal," Lara said, halfway through their ride, unable to maintain the silence. She also felt eager to perhaps assuage his obvious fears. "We'll make it. Okay? Stick with us. It'll be alright."

He nodded. "I know."

They were silent for almost the entire rest of the ride.

When they reached the airport, passing three security checkpoint even for the small strip she could see beyond a number of (relatively) modest hangers, they all piled out and into a thin-chested cargo plane, its quarters for them hardly vast, and the size available for their loadout large enough with some space to spare. A jeep had been already been rolled onto its cargo bay, and locked into place with a trio of straps. Otacon told them of their plans to entertain no transfers, risking a non-stop flight to La Paz with just one passenger arriving, with the other two passengers disembarking on a layover in Chile.

"Otacon, we're not going to be able to land in La Paz without being arrested, and entering through Chile could cost us days. You two can make it, no problem, but—" Snake was protesting, leaned up against one door of the jeep while Otacon went over a clipboard and checklist. Lara was investigating the contents of the Jeep with admiration until she saw reason to interject.

"Snake, we're doing nothing of the sort."

"Hn?"

Lara plucked a duo of parachutes from the back hatch of the Jeep's interior and slugged him in the chest with one. "Don't suppose you fancy a bit of skydiving?"

Snake looked at Lara, then at Otacon, at a loss with the parachute in his hands. "You have got to be kidding."

Otacon shrugged, biting one corner of his lip. "Sorry, Snake. I didn't have much choice. Besides, you guys aren't dropping in at an especially high altitude. You'll be jumping off as we make a premature descent into La Paz."

A man in a helmet, aviator glasses, and airtraffic uniform approached. "You three are going to have to board and strap in, we're departing in ten."

Otacon finished his checklist and left to one corner of the cargo bay's floor, rubbing the ridge of his nose. He looked troubled.

Lara watched as Snake, without a word, handed her the parachute, went to him, and in the distance between them, she couldn't make out what was said. Otacon pallor was still pale, and he looked thinner somehow. She watched, feeling like a voyeur, as Snake spoke to him, listening more than talking, and only caught a sentence. "Are you sure," from Snake, said with an eyebrow raised. Otacon nodded in return, and Snake put both hands on his shoulders and seemed to give him a reaffirming squeeze. Otacon looked up at him, and again, she was disarmed by how handsome Snake looked when he smiled. It seemed infectious; in short order Otacon returned, and then sat down, seemed weary but not as exhausted.

Lara did likewise, buckling herself into the canvass seat of the wall-mounted chair, and rapidly found herself asleep.


	13. PART ONE: CHAPTER 8

Eight hours later, ascending cloud cover and the massive double engines on either side of them, twin rockets blew out the glass on their side of the window.

Lara jolted awake. They had been riding the plane for almost eight hours at that point, and would be overhead of their destination within little time left. The duration, Lara had spent asleep, and as she found out later, little had occurred in her stead. Otacon and Snake went over a map of the area, meet up plans after they landed for retrieval (with both accurately guessing Lara might be better suited to play chauffeur, with Snake staying behind in the rural underbrush, and other concerns that would ultimately have little bearing.

Her first thought, after coming to consciousness, was that they had already crashed. Out of instinct or fear, her initial response had been one of reflection to another, much more severe wreckage in her past, one she had no intent on reliving.

"Snake!" She tried to move to her feet, but found it useless. She unclasped the belt. A minor look towards a window not yet shattered revealed miles of treetop canopy in every direction, and not a road in sight.

Snake was already standing, naked from the waist up, pulling on a form of traditional military camouflage fatigues. The hood of the jeep was a makeshift table, and on it laid out a pair a pair of pistols and two other firearms, his parachute, a bit of technological odd ends, and fatigues she'd brought along. He was slipping on a shirt and jacket matching his pants thrown over an open door to the jeep.

Covering the length of his forehead, she also saw the navy-blue bandanna, wrapped around the length of his head, keeping his hair from his eyes and tattered at one end.

He had a pistol holster strapped to one hip, and after covering his torso, he tossed a harness to Lara. The air whipped his voice from the air, and she had to shout at him to get him to repeat himself. Air pressure was non-existent. "We've got trouble, get this on!"

Lara caught the parachute, stood, and went to him. She began stripping and redressing. The plane's bay rocked and shimmied in its movement. Wisps of her hair stung at her face, and she shivered from the cold before slipping into the longer trousers provided. They had a slightly different camouflage pattern, she noticed, trying not to think of the absurdity of the observation.

Another explosion rocked them, and Snake went end over end to the back of the plane, Otacon just having taken to his feet and forcefully sat back down. The items atop the jeep's hood went flying off to one side, and Lara managed to stay on her feet only by the nature of grabbing hold of its grill in time. "Snake!"

He recovered quickly, pushing off the plane's sidewall, the one housing Otacon's seat and the side with windows still intact. "I'm alright!"

Lara had finished dressing, mercifully, and snapped closed the holsters housing a pistol on either hip. "Hal, why are they shooting at us? Can't we ascend?"

"I don't know, and no, not fast enough." As an exclamation point to end the debate, a shudder ran through the plane, and each shot out an arm to the nearest structure for balance. The explosions, tapered with hardly any space between them, sounded dull, like concussive meshes of sound and force married through fire. "This isn't restricted airspace, there shouldn't even be people in this region, let alone anyone with anti-air missiles!"

Snake had grabbed at Otacon's shoulders, helped him to his feet. "Is this thing armed?" He shouted.

"No!" Otacon jabbed at his glasses in what looked a painful measure, like trying to lodge them onto his nose in anticipation of their being ripped from his face. "We don't have any air-to-air defense, why would we? I didn't expect we'd end up shot down!"

Snake shouted something back at him neither Otacon appear to nor Lara heard. Once Otacon was on his feet steadily, he recovered the items thrown to the floor of the plane, picking up her magnetic grapple and harness. Otacon, meantime, was unstrapping large metal containers, slightly taller than he was, from their canvass straps holding them in place. Otacon shouted over the increasingly terrible waver of air assaulting them in a hideous vacuum. "What did you say? I can't hear you!"

"We're not being shot down!"

Snake had loaded a small, single-round pistol with a barrel almost as thick as her fist.

"Open the bay door!"

Otacon looked at Lara, who finished the meager preparations she could, and went to stand by Snake's side. Snake handed her a pistol, likewise, and examining it, it dawned on her.

It was a flare gun, and a bunch of rounds.

"OTACON! Open the bay doors!"

Otacon stared, slack-jawed, at the both of them.

"Snake, I can't! We'll lose the jeep, the gear, the—"

Lara spun on her heel, knowing he had little understanding and trying to fill in where Snake could not. "Hal, those are heat seeking anti-aircraft missiles!" She waved a handful of flare rounds in her palm. "If we don't divert the attention of those rounds, we're not making it to La Paz, we're not making it off this plane alive!" Still, he looked terrified, confused, even on the verge of mental collapse. She went to him, put a hand on either part of his head, and made eye contact, gently tugging on his chin. "Hal, you have to trust us! Please, open the door!"

He gritted his teeth, nodded, then went to the opposite end of the plane, and punched one of the buttons on a panel. Within just a moment, the violent air that rushed past them almost calmed, the bay's air pressure stabilising, and then the bay's door began its slow descent.

Outside, the sun was waving off its work, beams of waning gold cast on emerald, a mountainside of step-like rock outcroppings in the distance blanketed in the scarf of brilliant viridian.

Within a moment, the view was ruined, as from grassy plains ascended the images of smoke-trailed missiles, metal sharks rising up above the treeline and gearing themselves towards the plane without the slightest hint of pause. They came in as a pair at first, then another volley, as three, then seven.

The two of them were on either side of the plane, each clinging to canvass wall-mounted handholds locked to the wall of the plane. They were continuing to descend, and She had to stiffen every leg in her muscle to maintain the sense she would not be sucked from the plane, either by the force of its new convulsions or the rockets' aggression.

Lara took fire first, aiming her flare out and firing without hesitation, trying to arc her shot as the magnesium burned itself in magnificent crimson hues towards the rockets. They did not divert course, not initially, but after a moment, they began a tilt, then their full attention, to the flares. One rocket's explosion blew out its partner closest, and Snake nailed two more, missiles detonating with malicious ebullience. The force of their explosions were, even at the distance they ignited, cacophonous beyond measure.

"We've been lucky so far!" Snake shouted out to her, voice gruff as it was on the rim of perceptible over the wind's howling.

"You call this lucky?" she shouted back.

"They haven't got a direct hit!" Snake fired another flare.

"Well, we live a charmed life!" Lara shot off another flare to follow his own. A missile collapsed in on itself. "Would you believe this isn't the first plane crash I've been in?"

Behind them, Lara could catch glimpses of Otacon, clad in his own parachute and careful not to be ripped off his feet, moving from place to place as he made the preparations for what she hoped would not be an emergency landing. Although she hadn't seen beyond the plane's rear and periphery, she did not imagine any better terrain ahead than behind for a graceful makeshift runway. She thought she heard Otacon yell about their pilots having parachutes, but couldn't make it all of the sentence.

For a moment, the rockets ceased.

Snake jammed out one hand , pointing to her right. "Lara!"

Initially, she didn't see it. Then, as their view accelerated slightly, she saw the clay-coloured dirt road stretching out from the wall of trees and winding itself a thin but clear path. A jeep not unlike their own careened from the road's mouth into the jungle, and was giving chase after them. It was close enough the men inside were visible.

Snake turned, and ran back to the interior of the plane. Lara turned to follow suit.

"Otacon! We've got to get off this plane!" Snake loosed the straps of the jeep and its locking mechanism. "Lara, the emergency brake!"

Lara climbed inside the jeep's door and pulled loose the break, getting out as quickly as she could. "Why the bloody hell did we give up on shooting it?"

"That manpads down there isn't heat seaking, the flares won't make a difference!" Lara did not quibble about the terminology, and Snake offered no explanation. He ran to the front of the jeep and began pushing it backwards out of the plane, and Lara helped the effort. "We have to dump as much as we can before we go down!

Otacon began trying to shove one of the steel containers, and once the jeep began reversing out of the plane's rear, she ran to help Otacon. "Hal, what about the pilots?" she shouted.

"They're going to bail once we're out!" They both had their back to the container and were using their legs for leverage, Otacon's face growing red with the effort. From the corner of her eye, she first saw and then heard the jeep tumble out into the fading light, the sunset swallowing it as the vehicle's undercarriage scraped audibly before disappearing. Snake joined their efforts, and the three of them moved onto the next once the first had enough momentum to simply slide out.

As Lara attempted a reply, the missile collided with one half of the plane, and it concussed itself a sudden weightlessness to the right side, a lopsided lilt that was immediate in its decay. The engines of the plane were suddenly much louder, and the remaining windows collapsed, the blow louder than any of the previous competition and causing a deafness unlike any comparison, close to visual in its disorienting violence. She bit the side of her mouth, and their efforts to push the other two crates from the plane were now moot. They were launched backwards, and the three of them created a daisy chan as they went rolling to the ground, Lara smashing one femur on the ribbed interior wall and grabbing hold in unison. She felt Otacon grab hold of her, Snake hold of him, and the weight was almost unbearable of the two men until the plane made a semblance of stability and they could regain their footing, however temporarily.

It was remarkably brief, to the point where, upon reaching her heels, she wondered if she had gotten up too fast. The plane began a descent sudden enough to propel them up to the bay's ceiling, and she heard Snake yell for one of them, both of them, she didn't know or care. There was only the disorientation that made any form of consistency.

Lara made an attempt at her feet in the limited window of opportunity that followed. If it was training, experience or agility, it made no difference, but Lara managed her footing first, and raced to either of them, still struggling to a type of balance. It was Otacon who had the hardest time of it, having to cling to the sides of the interior like a drunk man. His glasses were gone. His mouth ran blood from one corner of his mouth, and his teeth in a moribund grimace every time he took a step towards the mouth of the plane.

"Lara!" She heard Snake on his second attempt, and when she turned, she saw him reach a hand out to her.

She took it, felt the strength behind his palm.

"I'm going to jump! Grab Otacon!" Snake gave her hand a squeeze, then let go.

Initially, she didn't understand why he had not simply taken the scientist himself, until seeing the ragged cut alongst one strap of his harness, cutting a swatch across not just his harness but his flak jacket, his chest.

Before she could protest, she watched the determination in his face harden like ice, and he sprinted up the ever-slanting bay and leapt from view.

Lara turned to Otacon, wrapped her arm around his, and dove from the plane.


	14. PART ONE: CHAPTER 9

The next half minute bled into a lifetime of disorienting haze, blurred green, blue, the shapes comingling with an onslaught of hues, swirling infinitesimally, making a ruin of her eye's colour cones, and in the dizziness of their shared lapse into the sky. Otacon was equipped with a parachute of his own, but in their failed leap from the plane, half stumble and half fall from its open mouth, they had gone face first, and begun a violent swirl between their shared weight.

The wind ripped at her hair, skin, eyes. She could see nothing, and at once saw too much. There was only the light's multicoloured recession of coherence and the sun periodically giving her an illusion of her surroundings. She felt wet all over her face, the mist of the altitude severe even so low to the ground. Otacon was pressed hard against her, hands digging as much into her shoulders as she dug into his. It was unpleasant only in the periphery of her mind, with the ripping agony of their freefall the more concerning displeasure.

Lara had little choice in manhandling the younger man. He had no weighted understanding of how to react, and after initially going limp, stiffened the muscles of shoulders, chest, and procedurally made it more difficult for her to guide their weight through the tumbling trajectory that accelerated all the time. They rolled over and over end dozens of times, her view spinning with the only mainstay being Otacon wrapped in her grasp however tenuously. As the plane disappeared from any proximity, and only the treeline approached ever faster, Lara roughly adjusted his body weight with hers, trying to right their position to an extent where she could let him go and they could deploy their chutes.

Maybe ten seconds had elapsed. Maybe a few hours. She couldn't tell. Time seemed to stretch out into the infinite. It was not something she could contain as a concept in the vagary of their ruined flight.

For a moment, the barest shimmer of their bodies coalesced, and she could guide him to face the earth, the trees, its populous of leaves and branches. She pressed one leg low on his, used a hand guiding his collarbone up, and in but a moment, they had slowed their descent just enough that they, hand in hand, ended their panicked scramble into the ether. Each of them had their legs and arms extended, like a bellyvault into water that would never come. After a moment, she managed to catch Hal's eye, and in a glance did her best to reassure him. Speaking was useless. The wind seared away vowels and snatched at her lips. She didn't try, so she was grateful that he looked relieved, if surprised, and still afraid.

Lara tapped a chord on her chest, made eye contact again. Held up five fingers.

Otacon raised an eyebrow at her, struggled with her pantomime for a moment. She watched understanding bloom on his face in the parching light. Lara prepared to release his hands, and would have to hope he could guide himself from there.

She held up four fingers. Otacon took hold of the chord on his harness, its ringed release.

Three fingers.

Two.

One.

The jolt was immense, sudden in a way that water's enveloping of a diver is sudden. It was jarring and Lara felt a yank on her ribs, shoulders, thighs, lungs, breasts. Her head went light in the expansion of the parachute, and the air evacuated from her with such velocity she was worried, at the wind's insistentence, if she might be able to regain it. Her descent, however, had already begun its slowing, and her relief was nothing short of exhilarated prayer.

The ring of her ripchord was still clutched tightly in her palm, like a set of oblong brass knuckles made instead of polymer, and she let it fall to the earth and disappear into the trees. It was then that she thought of the height they had to have jumped from. Lara looked to the ground, and tried not to wince. They might have leapt from a hundred and fifty, maybe as high as two hundred meters. She had no idea. But they were in free fall for so long, they must have scraped by the skin of their teeth. Lara thought of the story it would make later, and tried not to smile at her own adrenaline's aphrodisiac qualities.

Then she thought of the other pilots, and Otacon.

And of Snake.

She cast an eye about for the younger man, finding him behind her and above her by only slight significance. They were a safe distance from each other, which had been a concern, and she was thankful it had ordered itself sensibly enough.

Lara then peered around for Snake. Aside from their rustlings, and the sound of the (much dimished) wind chilling her skin, she saw nothing. The sky was clear, and the only thing that met her eyes were the array of trees and their occasional gaps.

The ground, regardless of the parachute, was nearing her faster than expected. She hoped Snake had managed it in the interim while she was still trying to collect the both of them into an opening position. There was no other sight she could see, at least, and the plane was likewise absent from the sky. Lara wondered idly of their supplies, in an attempt to try and divert from her more pressing anxiety, one that only grew once she was on the ground.

They landed in one of the few spaces between, onto a vacant patch where a river bubbled over rocks nearby. Twin steering cables in either hand, Lara steered her chute to the opening, unable to avoid landing in the water. She ran with the force of the landing, finding it harder than she remembered, having to remind herself that normal drops were a bit more collected. Before landing, she spotted what looked like a bit of debris from the plane, but had no time to investigate. Losing her footing, she rolled forward, still with enough sense of mind not to fight the inertia, and tucked her limbs inwards. The stream bed's rocks had all been ground down into pebbles and round edges, and although she was less satisfied with being made to traipse about in wet clothing, she was infinitely grateful to be back on ground that could not drop her hundreds of meters to an unpleasant demise.

Lara was removing her harness when she heard the crash, and Otacon's nearby yell. She finished up and moved into the brush to find him. She was surprised that he had, with some perspective, done relatively well considering his lack of experience. Otacon was tangled in the branches of a monument to botany, its myriad arms evanescing higher than most of its surrounding flora.

"Don't suppose you need a hand, Hal?" She moved to him, just a few feet off the ground, and she needed only stand on her tiptoes to help him out of the harness.

"That went a lot better than I thought. I wasn't sure we'd make it." He was out in just a moment's aid, and took a brief look around.

"I don't guess you grabbed my glasses, huh?"

She shrugged, put her palms up.

"Ah, man. I think I have an extra pair in my bag, but that's with Snake. He probably busted 'em on the way down. That guy, I swear." He instinctively tried to apply them further up the ridge of his nose, and it wasn't until after his comment did Lara bolt back to the stream.

She ran to the small pack that she'd spotted

Crouching down, she picked it up in her hand. It was a canvass bag with a small wealth of preparatory items inside.

Otacon approached from behind her, crunching pebbles underfoot and splashing slightly in his sneakers.

"Hey, what's up?" Otacon said. When Lara didn't reply, he came over and examined Lara's find. She stood up. "What is all this?"

Lara looked into the woods. The treetrunks offered nothing. She wandered out, carefully and being certain of the sounds around her and any disturbance they might offered. The soil grew less damp and grass came in to fill the water's absence the further she got. Moss grew in tufts around tree roots. They wired themselves into the ground in thick ropes, mushrooms with thin stalks on the perimeter. She did a rough perimeter of the stream, going north of their landing area, then south.

When she spotted the parachute, Lara called against her better judgement to Otacon. She didn't care if anyone else may have heard her, although it ultimately mattered very little.

Otacon approached, and inspected the find.

High in the branches of a tree was a deployed parachute, its beige harness yanked almost all the way through on one side, where a leg would have been secured to a waist.

There was blood on the edge of its thick fabric, but no bootprints, no other trace.

"Lara, I don't get it," he said. "Obviously he made it down, but why would he leave? Where'd Snake go?"

Lara stared out into the jungle, facing away from him.

"I don't know."


	15. PART ONE: CHAPTER 10

Rain gave its threat as the evening began to approach, clouds drifting in like steel wool taking on purple rust. Sunset did its best to sift through their dense bodies in flourishes of colour, vague bruises that ebbed away as soon as they'd settled. There was hardly more than the transitory vista before the clouds enveloped everything, and night was coming in like a wave of blued black. It was not yet dark enough for stars, the tangerine colour seeping through everything coming in and out of visual consciousness, but the sky would be only an illusion by the time night had eaten everything else.

Mist collected on leaves, holding illumination as much as moisture on beads perched upon the foldes and veins of their skin, tracing out thin trails of dew before diving off the pointed tapers of each leaf's tip. Tree branches were wiry, slender, thick and ropey. They were great tangles, and long, tendril-like caresses at the sun retreating over the mountains. They were nothing but violent stabbings. The trees breathed in sighs of wind, exhaled out with the tumble of dewdrops. The whole of the forest filled its lungs then emptied them in vast, uneven breaths.

The silence that came in was hardly quiet at all, the sound of a jungle filling in jagged moist spaces, sounds soft as moss between roots, the jungle venerating the evening's onset with choral bird calls, chirping notes flattening out, rising in pitch, falling down the scales. Vibrato and warble added finesse and body to their heady resonance. It added to the forest's chest of sound.

Amongst the rest and most prominent to her, there was the sound of the running stream, water traipsing over rounded stones. Like laughter from two rooms away.

Lara had already begun preparing herself to leave in an attempt to hunt down Snake, in a strictly intellectual sense seeing as all supplies had vacated themselves. There had to be signs of his passage, she knew that much. She had once tracked a tiger to its nest in a ruin over three miles away, taking up most of the day in the process. She refused to believe, no matter how talented, that Snake had not left some hint of his passing, unintentional or not.

Otacon had taken from the recovered backpack the means of a miniscule tent, which could serve sojourn until they could make short pilgrimage to the remains of the plane, and track down the remnants of their carried goods in the process.

"Do you think it's a good idea to try and hunt him down?" Otacon said.

"I don't know him very well-"

"Really, neither do I," Otacon said.

"-But he left for a reason, Hal, and he left in a hurry. We can't stay out here like this."Lara was double checking a knife she'd strapped to one boot before they had left New York. It was the closest thing she had to a method of self defense. "Little as I like leaving you here, if I can't find him in a few hours, I won't be able to find the trail at all. Nightfall's not going to help me in that regard.

"Alright. Are you going to be alright with just a blade? I mean, no offense."

"None taken, and yes, I imagine I'll do just fine. I've traveled with less. Why in God's name were we being shot at?"

Otacon kicked a stone into the stream just beyond their palaver. "Frankly, I don't have any idea. The closest guess I could hazard is maybe they thought we were private security contractors? That'd explain why they were so intent on shooting us down, but that was an aggression I'd never anticipated we'd see. If I had known we were going to be in the middle of something like that…"

"Hal, don't beat yourself up. It doesn't fit a man of your character. And, with due respect, we've got quite our work cut out for us, so I need you to hold it together for all of us, okay? I'll come back to camp here with you tonight, and we'll do what we set out to starting tomorrow morning." She looked skyward. "I've got a limited window. Try to stay safe out here. If I had something to give you…" She looked about, on herself, and sighed. There was nothing to offer. She turned to go.

"Lara?"

She turned back to look at him.

"Do you think we got in over our heads, here?"

_Yes. _"No. We came to do something that couldn't have been done if we'd waited. There wasn't anything to be done of it, I'm afraid." She gave him a reassuring smile. As the light cast a momentary shade of red off the tent's flap and onto his wet cheek, she thought he looked older today than the day prior, but dismissed it as five-o-clock shadow. "We'll make it. Snake's quite the lad, I'm sure he's off harassing the wildlife. Back in a pinch, I promise."

And she left, no surer of her place in the country than he was.

The earliest parts of the hike were the hardest, only that her bloodstream was ebbing out the adrenaline, and she'd felt the sickening lethargy that came with it. Once it had been surmounted and she felt her body return to its normal state, where she was more readily of control of her biochemistry and not the other way around, she understood a bit more clearly how the crash had occurred. There was such a violent opposition to their entry into the country, Otacon's explanation made more and more sense, but that make her only more cautious, if not exactly fearful. She'd encountered militaristic types before. Gritted-teeth idealists weren't far removed from hired thugs with a few principles. She hoped.

The jungle, once she'd left the sandy, rocky open space that Otacon had set up their negligible camp near, was all-encroaching, and it was almost comforting if not for the coolness it presented. With night's onset would enliven chill that was held at bay only by the thickness of the airy, soupy with heat and insects. It clung to every inch of her body, making sticky work of her clothes, and although she was used to it, there would be some time before she could comfort herself with the relief of a hidden pond or sacrosanct bath. For the time being, on every side there were only miles of tree trunks, rows of steepled roots thrust like speedbumps out of the soil, and the clawing of branches that offered no empathy.

The trail for following Snake was among the lightest she'd ever seen, but once Lara realized how he had disappeared after a bit of examination of his landing zone, following the rest of his leavings proved efficient, if sparse. He had used his harness as a sort of stepping stone to the trees above, and remained perched there for at least a few minutes. He must had been following someone else, because she saw the grindings of bark that had been left by his boots and his weight on the branches extend from tree after tree. If she hadn't been looking for the markings, she would have assumed they were simply caused by like flora and fauna; so little existed in disturbance. There were no broken branches, and he had been careful to pick ones that would sustain his weight. Likewise, no detritus from the trees themselves ever hit the forest floor, with leaves fallen underfoot barely out of the ordinary, and had she not the proof above would never have made any discernible pattern. Snake was still, however, a foreigner as much as she was, and after quite a few meters, he had leapt to the floor, making his trail much easier to track.

It was in the fervency of tracing the evidence he'd diffused that she almost missed the empty cartridges, stamped into mud and wet, gleaming up from the trail.

Lara had been following his trail for over an hour, and she saw them first as a minor glimmer from her periphery, then upon a closer glance saw them for what they were. She dug one out of the mud, looked it over, then back to the spot it'd been stamped into. A boot had pointedly made the attempt at hiding it, in a hurry she presumed, and then moved on. Even a cursory look about the area showed there had been no scuffle, nor had there been any fire at the environs nearby, so she presumed it was the rebels who had opened up at their plane, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to shoot them out of the sky. Likewise, did Lara spot Snake's own boot treads, presumably doing what she had done moments ago, which was to investigate the scene. But unlike her, he had left the evidence almost completely untouched. She had no such interest or reservations about preserving its value, and moved on.

Once his footing became more clear, she began chasing after his bootprints, thankful she no longer had to _manoeuvre_ from branch to branch in her tracking. When she did catch up, she almost ran into him.

What she noticed at first was, again, the bandanna wrapped tight around his forehead and hair, material thin enough she could make out his scowling eyebrows beneath it. In Africa, she had once had the displeasure of observing a band of marauders with guns rolling into a small town with makeshift warpaint smeared across their eyes. They looked like oni with rifles. It was the first thing she thought of when she saw him, and it took her a moment to be certain he had no designs against her. All of that contrasted with the almost casual way he leaned against a tree, beginning the production of a cigarette as a ritual she'd learn too well.

"Funny running into you here. How's things? Did you make it down okay?" Lara said, thinking she felt elated from the bit of sprinting she'd done through the jungle.

Snake nodded, looking ragged and out of breath. His hair was wet from the humidity. "Yes on both counts. You guys okay? I was worried about leaving both of you there but I didn't really have time to write you a note."

"Worried about us? Why Snake, I'm touched." She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her face, thought about re-binding her ponytail, thought better of it. She frowned at his bad habit. "Good lord, is all you do smoke and drink? And no wonder Americans have a bad reputation. Probably why you're so out of breath."

"Tch. Best things on earth, you know."

"Tea and a warm bath are the best things on earth, not saleable poison. Where'd you go? I found the nest of automatic shells about a hundred meters back."

Snake jerked a thumb against his back, what she judged to be north east. "I was coming down and I saw the bunch of those guys with the launchers running off into the brush."

"Running off? Why not rush in, finish the job?" Lara had to admit, watching Snake light a cigarette and inhale deeply as though it was air from Olympus itself, that he made it look bloody appealing, at least.

"If they were trying to down the plane because they thought we were with those mercenaries, then they probably got a look at our gear and realised they'd made a mistake. We could be American VIPs for all they know."

"With our kit? I can't imagine that's likely. But you're right in as much Hal was thinking they believed us with Araignée's troops. It's the only thing that seems to make sense so far," Lara said.

"I got as far as here before I lost them, but I did catch one good look at their leader."

"Their leader? I hope he's not another one of those going-to-save-the-world-one-bullet-at-a-time types. I've had my share of those, thank you."

"I don't think so. She seems a little more focused than that."

"She?"

"Come on, I'll tell you on the way back. Let's get out of here."


	16. PART ONE: CHAPTER 11

Author's Authorial Authorism: Feeling frisky. Three updates this week. Second on Thursday (6/13), third on Friday/Saturday (6/14 or 15). Thanks for the support, everyone.

* * *

The walk back was shorter than Lara had expected it to be. Her sense of time seemed to stretch out in her pursuit of him, then clench and diminish when they began talking. It seemed more profound in retrospect, when they began coming to the edge of the impromptu camp and she realized she wanted more time to speak with him, or interact, or something. It wasn't terribly clear to hear, the sensation, and at once she knew intrinsically that it was something less than platonic. If Snake understand and felt likewise, he gave no signifier. For that matter, neither did she; she wasn't a bloody schoolgirl, she didn't' wheedle or verbally stumble over him. But it was a draw, and she tried her best to chalk it up to the adrenaline that had, less than hours prior, dominated her circulatory system.

What he knew, in short order, wasn't much, but it most certainly was an improvement from the trepidation Otacon had inadvertently nurtured in her. The woman Snake had seen had been accompanied by a four-man escort of guerillas, and each was heavily armed. Lara opined that perhaps she was some sort of general, but Snake seemed unconvinced, which opened up the possibility that she was a commander of some sort for the group. Of that, they had no concrete conclusion. Snake also mentioned her description: thin, with a severity of feature that did not quite seem likely of a South American woman, and with blonde hair it all but ruled out the idea of the uprising's indigenous origins.

"Although it might seem like a bit of an odd question, if you had to place them on a scale of intent to kill us?"

Snake glanced at her, casting away his second cigarette as they approached the camp. "Eight."

"Well, it's not a ten, so by God I'll take it."

As the clearing began its proximity close enough they could hear the babbling of water over rocks, for the first time Snake seemed faint, and leaned against a tree without any warning, the colour draining from his face.

Lara turned to look at him, thinking he had just taken a lean so he could relight his cigarette, the air being as moist as it was. Instead, she found him pained, lips drawn back to bare teeth, veins quietly throbbing in the sinew of his neck. "Snake?" She put a hand on his shoulder, felt the muscle beneath the cloth tighten. "Snake, are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." He opened his eyes to sneer at the sky for a moment, rolling his eyes sarcastically. "Probably got oxygen sickness from the sudden descent."

Lara had no interest in correcting his understanding of the malady. "Mm, maybe. Are you sure you're alright?" She began to look him over, pat at his ribs or anywhere else he might have taken injury. There were no marks on his fatigues, no punctures she could discern in the clothing or laceration signs. "You seem okay. Maybe you're just a bit winded?"

"I said I'm fine." He forcefully removed her palms from him, and brushed past her.

"My, aren't we touchy?" Before he could tuff-guy his way beyond her reach, she pulled at him, spun him around. "Snake, I know you're a professional, and I understand that Otacon and I are the odd men out here. This isn't our element. But if something's the matter, you need to tell me now so I can make sure something doesn't go awry later on down the line?" She touched at his chin gently to make eye contact with him. His eyes were blue, like water running through crystal. She tried to look stern, concerned. "Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"Now, really, are you going to be alright? These aren't the friendliest territories."

He thought for a moment, then reluctantly admitted himself. "I, uh, feel a little lightheaded. It's nothing, really. It's been bugging me since we got out here." When she looked unconvinced, he growled a bit. "Look, if it were a cut or a something, I'd tell you, okay? You're almost as bad as he is."

"Oh, no, I imagine I'm worse. Well, if that's all it is, let's get back at it. There's quite a lot that needs doing." For the time being, she let it go. They moved the extra bit of yardage, and there were soon in Otacon's company again. She felt relieved when he climbed out of the tent, looking sweaty and tired but otherwise no worse.

"Snake!" Otacon looked to Lara. "Hey, I wasn't sure you two were coming back. How'd it go?"

"Well," she said. "he's not an easy man to track down, but I managed. Caught sight of someone less than welcoming, I'd say." She let Snake fill him in on the details. "Hal, did you make it alright?"

"Yeah, aside from a few odd noises, I wasn't too spooked." He shook a metal caraffe full of water. "Found this buried in the bushes after you left. With the stream, at least we won't die of dehydration. "

Snake was looking around the stream, what could have been a sort of road heading north-south with running water as its dividing line, cutting a swatch through the jungle and letting them see for a short distance in either direction, rounded stones acting as pavement in lieu of the moss-eaten soil they'd encountered on the trek back. "I heard a few animals while I was tracking the group that'd be firing on us. The wildlife must be used to people in this area, so there's a good chance if we need to, hunting shouldn't be much of a problem. "

"Hunting?" Otacon looked to Snake, then Lara. He was far from panic, but overt concern was always on the edge of his voice. "How long could we be out here?"

"Hal, Snake is being a bit of an alarmist." She tried to stare Snake into more a more comforting mood. He seemed oblivious, more interested in examining their surroundings. "We probably won't be out here more than a week, tops." As little as she liked lying to him, and as dangerous their situation could be, she did actually believe it as true. Civilisation would be quite a trek, but Bolivia was far from a no-man's-land.

Maybe she had underestimated Snake's diplomacy, because he turned to face Otacon. "She's right. Besides, even if we are out here a while, Lara's got the chops to make sure we don't eat some poison berries or something. Right?"

Lara laughed. "Flattery's only charming if it's sincere, but yes, I can make sure we're not on death's door." Crouching, she felt the ridged leaves of a shrub, feeling the lightly soapy texture of its chlorophyll excreted onto the endless digits of a larger plant. They were almost furry, rubbed between her two fingers, and she could scent its remnants left on her index and thumb. "Bolivia's got more than enough flora to keep us afloat, and with a little foresight, most of it shouldn't be harmful. Just don't go wiping random plants on yourself as substitutes for soap, mm?"

Her comment reminded Otacon of a more pressing concern than hygiene, and he reminded them of their situation regarding supplies. Most of anything useful had been jettisoned, and although Lara had not initially understood why, Snake informed her that if the plane went did (which, it was hardly prescient of them, seemed likely at that point) then at least there could be scavenged some refuse from its crash, lest it ignite with, or because of, the plane's crash. It was hardly a roundtable discussion; an expedition resolved to find their goods, without need for dissent. Nightfall would make such a trip, no matter how short, impossible, and they would have to hope that if their pilots had made it, they could survive another eight hours. Lara advised although they were hardly easy prey, with the wildlife undoubtedly used to indigineous peoples, that the Amazon was not a place for traipsing about without proper armament.

"Is this technically the Amazon?" Otacon asked.

"Technically nothing, Hal, we're in its heart. How far, I couldn't say, but the Amazon is huge, and South America has biodiversity enough to make it more dangerous than most of the northern world. It's better we're here. For now."

Snake had been examining their surroundings with skepticism, periodically looking about in the pebbles, as if scouring for something. She heard a sound of his interest low in his throat, a rumbling. It reminded her of a puma, or jaguar maybe, and when one lip lifted slightly to bare teeth, it did nothing to dissuade her of the image.

Lara watched him moving about, then watched him wander off nonchalantly into the brush.

She felt the skin on her arms prickle, like a draft had come in.

"I'm going to go collect firewood. I'll be in earshot if you two need me." And just like that, only his fading crunching of the underbrush, Snake had wandered off again.

"Huh? What's into him? Jeez, that guy's got—"

"I'm going to do the same, Hal." She turned to the forest.

She peered deep into the lines of trees, of limbs with their dewy leaflets. Insects hummed in the background, chirruping, buzzing. The sun was a hazy mist that had retired over the mountains, and light came into their encampment by proxy of the mist that could be felt but not seen.

Lara stared out into the emerald, and waited.

"Lara? Are you okay?" Otacon had stood, nudged her in the elbow.

Nothing stirred. Just everything.

She looked at him over her shoulder. "Yeah, Hal. It's okay." She turned back to the forest. The birds were winding down for the day. She did not hear Snake, just the jungle. "I'll be back in a little while, we should probably just get that fire going."


	17. PART ONE: CHAPTER 12

When the two members ICRA's came into the camp, it was almost a relief.

Snake and Lara had been back for a few hours. Lara's internal clock was justified when Snake had produced a timepiece that had survived their descent, a Seiko on his wrist that looked as nondescript as it was sturdy. She'd estimated they had touched down around five, and gotten back to camp around seven, so it was almost nine thirty about the time they heard the underbrush moving on its own accord.

The fire had begun earnestly, off to one side of the stream and in a plot of the sand-strewn turf in a little circular cairn comprised of dry branches and underbrush. Snake had offered a makeshift flint and steel, Lara had already taken care of it, with the admiration of both men. It was big enough to keep them warm, but not large enough that it might overrun their circle of round stones and turn into a brushfire if unattended. It had been a long time, over ten years, since she had needed to make fire without real implements, but it wasn't a skill that had faded with time any.

At the time, Otacon was swatting at his arms, Snake smoking like a chimney, and with Lara generally disinterested in trying to deter the mosquitoes. "Are the two of you going to be alright?"

"Yeah, if I have any blood left by the time we can get indoors. Jeez, I'm covered in bites." Otacon had been dividing his time between slapping his forearms and shifting with discomfort, cross-legged, on the ground.

"Here. Try this." Snake held out his cigarette, newly lit, after taking a thick inhalation of it.

Otacon looked at him, then the white stick, with skepticism. Lara kept quiet.

When Otacon began to cough after barely placing it to his lips, then tossed it in the fire, Lara burst out laughing.

"Son of a-"

"You smoke those? God, Snake, I can't even-"

"In the service, popular knowledge is that tobacco smoking has some minor ability to repel mosquitoes and other bugs."

"Well," Otacon said, waving a hand in front of his face, "popular knowledge also had it that the earth was flat. Those mosquito coil things are even worse, actually, and –"

It was then that, behind them, branches and leaves shifted. Fallen bark crackled.

Lara held up her hand. The two men silenced immediately.

Snake looked at Lara, tapped the empty holster on one hip. She nodded, patted the pistols strapped to hers. She'd almost forgotten they were there, having no cause to adjust or use them. She tossed one to Snake, who immediately checked its clip and turned off its safety.

They both stood, and Lara took point in from of Snake, and behind him, Otacon was on his feat, looking determined if uncertain. Snake held his pistol at the ready, both hands, aimed to the ground but in a combat stance.

"If they're here to ambush us, I think they're doing a rather poor job of it," she muttered over one shoulder. "You there! Come out, and show yourselves!" Lara paused for a minute, considered carefully, and repeated herself in Portugese, and Spanish.

From the jungle's innards, wading out of shadows, came hurried murmuring, then a female, American voice. "Please, we're just relief workers! We're not armed, we're coming out!"

First from the jungle was a young woman, maybe twenty five, in khaki shorts and a thin, beaten headband holding back blond hair. After her was a larger man, wiry in his musculature, and as deeply tanned as the woman to the point it was clear they'd been in the country for a long time. Both Anglo, they had bronzed themselves well beyond Lara's year-round tan.

Both traipsed out clumsily, arms raised, although the man looked much more irritated. They had only canvass messenger bags hung from their waists, with a crested shield emblem that was faded into the central flap.

It was Snake who was quickest to put down his gun, flipping on the safety and holstering it, but not handing it back when Lara held out her hand. He peered beyond them, into the flickering light created by the fire. "Are you two alone?"

"Yes," the man said, with a slight Australian fade, " we're here because of the plane, we—"

Otacon moved to stand beside Lara, who had put down her gun. They lowered their arms. "Were you two at the plane?" Otacon asked.

"Yes, we weren't sure if anyone had survived the crash. We've been following the debris left from when its cargo was jettisoned." The man looked ill-at-ease, but slightly calmed now that firearms had been put away.

Lara turned away. "So, you didn't find anyone."

The woman shook her head. "No." And then, on the heels of this. "It would have been quick. I'm sorry. We didn't have the tools to put them to rest, but we didn't leave them where they were."

Out of the corner of her eye, Lara thought she caught Snake grit his teeth, close his eyes. It was not a sensation alien to her. Otacon ran a hand through his hair, and swore.

"I wish we were opening with better news to deliver," the blonde said. She extended her hand to Lara. "I'm Ellie Quint. This is Malcolm Vines."

"Wish it was under better weather, right. Thank you for doing what you could." There was a hesitation, and then she decided there would be no point hiding her own identity. "Lara Croft."

"We know," she replied. "Vines and I heard about your expedition, years ago. And, of course, there's been everything since. You're very brave."

She felt her gut tighten. "You mean the shipwreck."

"Are your friends famous too?" Ellie said.

Otacon held his hand out to her, shook, and repeated the gesture with Vines. "Hal Danziger."

Snake turned and followed Otacon's lead. He had satisfied himself they were alone. "Iroquois Plissken."

Vines looked at Snake skeptically, but didn't remark on it.

Lara brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "We were actually headed into La Paz when this happened. We were shot down, but not certain by whom, and we haven't gotten to recover any communications equipment."

"You guys are relief workers?" Snake asked, and pointed to the emblem on their packs. "Who's your organisation?"

"We're with the International Corps for Relief and Aid."

"The ICRA?" Lara asked. "You blokes abstained from commentary on the war, right?"

"Which one?" Vines asked.

"All of them," Snake said, producing another cigarette. "Holds together diplomatic efforts, but I bet it keeps your hands clean, too doesn't it?"

Both Ellie and Vines seemed drastically uncomfortable, and Lara felt little pity. It was a mercy that Otacon was perhaps more forgiving, stating "We appreciate you guys being here, but why are you both here?"

Ellie nodded, flicking curls out of her hair. "We try to patch up whomever we can. There's a lot of rural guerillas out here. Farmers, mostly. The loss of human life is a tragedy, no matter who dies. "

On that, the five of them seemed to agree.

Vines said, "And we're here because of the rebellion."

"You mean the embassy?"

Snake took to a crouching position by the fire. Ellie did likewise, and the rest followed suit. It was Ellie who replied. "No. The embassy attack isn't the first, or the last, attack Bolivia's going to see."

"What do you mean?"

Ellie and Vines exchanged looks.

"There's a group in the jungle who've been putting something together for eight months, give or take. They're determined to overthrow the entirety of the government, oust the whites in power. They're intent on a bloody massacre. It's what they want."

Lara shook her head, trying to ignore the bugs. "I don't follow."

After a moment, Vines stared into the fire.

"They're building a weapon to unify the entirety of the South American continent. And they're calling it, La Paz Caminante."

Snake looked up. When he spoke, he sounded reverent. And, somehow, maybe even scared.

"'The Peace Walker.'"


	18. PART ONE: CHAPTER 13

As Lara drifted to consciousness, she thought momentarily she had dreamt the crash's aftermath, and instead been the only survivor

The sun ran its magnificent bloom over the kingdom it nourished. Every plant and flower seemed to open, every leaf warmed to the touch, dripping with clear, clean water. The air's tepid humidity was soothing, and light flowed constantly down upon the world of verdant colour. Overhead, birds sniggered from their perchs, and that natural song made her temporarily fearful she had awoken to a very different future than the past she had shouldered.

What jarred her out of such thoughts was realizing she was being gently, even benevolently, observed.

By Snake.

He was seated, back to a massive tree trunk, one hand loosely holding the pistol she'd given him, one knee raised with his arm resting upon it. When he spoke, she could see his eyebrows shift with regard under the cloth of the bandanna.

"You sleep okay?"

Lara sat herself up on one elbow, rubbed her eyes. "About as well as can be expected. I think it was the exhaustion more than any of the accommodations." She pushed the waterproof sleeping mat off her, having been folded in it like a tortilla. In her subconscious, she stored the gentle snores of Otacon and their new companions nearby. In spite of their speech, the birds, and the everpresent running water from one side, it was quiet. Serene. She felt comforted for his presence.

"Have you been up this _whole_ night?"

He shook his head. "I was gathering firewood in case we camp here another night when I chased off a wild cat. After that I got about an hour."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Nothing too big. Once it realized it was outnumbered, it wasn't going to chance the fight. She wandered off." He set the pistol down, perhaps because now there was another conscious person about, on a small square of cloth next to him, with a canteen of water for company. He took a pull from the canteen, and as she approached him, offered it to her.

She took a drink, then laughed. "Only you could stare down a leopard."

"Pfft. Maybe as big as a dog. I don't think panthers are in this sort of—"

Lara sat down next to him, and replied, "Oh, yes, they are. Maybe not terribly large ones, but leopards none the less."

The night previous came back to her as bits of tired conversation as she already began to nod off. The consensus had been to make a trip to the plane once dawn crested the mountains, and they had shaken off the fatigue of the accident. There had been little talk of this Metal Gear after the comment about La Paz Caminante, and Snake did not want to cast conjecture where there wasn't evidence to support any of it, especially with answers arriving soon enough. After that had followed some concern about the state of the rebellion, and neither of them had much more information regardless, but it could wait, with both relief workers offering to take them to a rebellion camp the following afternoon. The rest of the night, however brief, had been a short examination of each of them by Ellie and Vines, at their insistence.

Snake had been the least pleased by this development, tolerating the exam from Vines with some grousing, but no real resistance. "I haven't felt anything, and it's been hours," Snake had said.

"You'd be surprised," Vines said, feeling Snake's ribcage with two hands, "at what the human mind can block out. A gating mechanism for pain can shut out significant injury for as much as a day sometimes in the right conditions."

When each of them had seen minor first aid for a few odd cuts, Ellie had produced thin half-blankets made from a waterproof vinyl with thin cotton lining, and Vines providing one more. Divying up the bedding was easy enough; Snake and Ellie both volunteered to give up their share, and Ellie took any spare jackets and cloth oddends for a pillow and blanket.

During conversation around the fire, Lara had slipping close to sleep more than once, and after laying down, was surprised by the ease that it took her. She had no dreams she could recall, just the afterbirth of some emotional remnants they had left behind.

"Snake," she said, glancing at Otacon. He'd rolled over once, and she would be surprised if they got more than an hour or two more. "You know more about the governing around here than I do."

'Yeah, but your knowledge is more practical. I'll trade you. What do you want to know?"

"Do you think there's a chance they could manage it? South America, I mean."

"Maybe. Brazil doesn't have a massive army, but it's hard to believe that other countries wouldn't get dragged into the conflict. Bolivia's had European rulers for most of its history, and the classism between La Paz and Cochabamba is at a fever pitch. Mobilising, hell, militarising the rural poor-"

"Becomes as easy as giving them guns."

"Bingo." He looked around, as the branches swayed from a sudden flux of wind into their small strip of jungle. If it had been a road, they would have been seated on the shoulder, with the stream and its pebbled bed as the yellow line down the middle. "How dense is this jungle? Could it hide an army?"

"Absolutely, but terrain being what it is, plus the weather and climate? I can't imagine they could be more than just a band of marauders at best," Lara said.

"You'd be surprised what marauders can get done. Che Guevera took Chile with a handful of outcasts," Snake said. "Lara, how dangerous is it out here if you were trying to create an op center?"

"A what?"

"A central base for commands to be carried out from and most of the artillery work to take place."

"Unlikely, if electronics are involved. You'd need a real structure, or else any sort of computing would be trashed by the humidity and the storms. And construction would have to have real, actual equipment, with real contractors. These people are coca and bean farmers, not engineers. Rainstorms can get severe enough that living out here can be next to impossible. That's not true of all of Bolivia's outback, but this…"

Snake growled.

Lara asked, "Snake. Do you think this… Metal Gear is capable of ruining the region, politically? Of the country?"

"No."

"Really? Why?"

"Because I don't think we're dealing with a Metal Gear."


	19. PART ONE: CHAPTER 14

"You don't think—" Lara cut herself off. She had to. The thought they had come out here, two men had been killed and that they were stranded for nothing was not aggravating, it was almost paralyzing in its emotional complication. She didn't get far, though."

Snake's hand was heavy, his grip slight in its benign weight. "Don't get worked up. I don't mean we're here for a bogus mission, it's just… Something doesn't click. Call it intuition."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't explain it, but something doesn't align. Theoretically, we're assuming Ocelot is selling REX's data to deep pockets, but Bolivia doesn't qualify."

"Do you know much of the coca plantations out here?" Lara asked.

Snake shook his head.

"Most of the agricultural work here is for coca leaves. Which, as I'm sure you've guessed, can be refined—"

"Not the word I'd use."

"-into cocaine. And a lot of industry is just that. But the days of huge plantations, massive operations with hundreds of workers churning out the stuff just isn't around anymore. There's no drug barons out here. Just…"

"People," Snake said.

"Right."

"Damn. That would almost simplify it. If the boys of El Che could afford the cost, I mean."

From across the stream, Otacon stirred.

"We should cut this short. Lara, you feeling okay?"

She felt nauseated by the idea that there could be something they knew even less about that posed a threat, something they were even less prepared for, but not scared. That was a small blessing. Lara nodded at him.

"Alright. You know, you sound like you've been out here once or twice."

Lara thought it sweet of him to change the subject. "I have. Once or twice. My travels lead me about town is all."

"I believe it. You're a tough lady."

"Sweet of you. But I'd be more worried about him than me." She waved a hand at Otacon.

"Him? Hm." He said nothing. Seemed to think for a moment. "Maybe you're right. He's taking it pretty hard."

"How well do you know him, Snake?"

"Not very, I guess. We'd only been working together about eight weeks before you came along."

"Keep an eye out for him, would you? He hasn't done this sort of thing before, and it's showing. If something happens and he snaps—"

"He won't snap."

Lara thought she detected a trace of defensiveness in Snake's voice. "Easy, I'm not judging him. Or you. Are you certain? When we came down, Hal panicked. If I hadn't right out descent, we could have been tangled in our chutes. He might not have even deployed his right. I just want to make sure he stays safe is all."

Snake seemed a little eased by the gentle quality of her tone. "Alright."

The birds overhead threw their notes back and forth, changing octaves as it suited them, cravats of bright down on their breasts.

"I think," Snake said, "If he were going to snap, he would have done it on Moses. It pushed him. He lost someone out there, you know. I don't know if that's in the book."

She looked at the man, laying on his bedding, snoring quietly, glasses set aside on a small outcropping of rocks."It doesn't matter if it is or not."

"What do you mean?" Snake asked.

Lara thought of the moments where she could feel a dim pain bake off him, like a mist. Something cool, that made him seem smaller, more inward. And the fury he threw himself into his work. No one she knew did that without some kind of skeleton in their closet. Something haunting them. It could be anything, but she thought it went back further that his encounter with Snake. A weight in his shoulders and a hesitation to talk about himself made him look like he'd learned to keep those things to himself a long time ago.

"I don't know," Lara said. "Call it woman's intuition."

They sat, listening to their compatriots breathing, and the sound of the forest rousing its life, the exhalations it made expanding, the cold the ground held evaporating.

"If you see that, what do you see about me?" Snake said.

Lara thought for a long time before replying.

"Certainly the same things you see in me, Snake. It doesn't matter, I imagine." She looked skyward. When Lara stood, she was surprised as her legs protested. She ignored them. "We need to get going."


	20. PART ONE: CHAPTER 15

_Author's Note: Author's Notes are the worst part of most pieces of fiction, but in some instances, a necessary evil. _

_Thanks go out again for the support in regards to updates, and I do try to take my self-imposed schedule seriously, if only for that if I don't come serious minded to the work, it falls apart. I'm hoping to make Monday a 4k or 5k-word update, and for frame of reference, the standard update is between 1k and 2,500k words. I really need to catch up to where I'd like to be, and start the process of moving Part One towards its conclusion. _

_As always, I love the feedback, and thanks for public and private comments. The more negative ones especially._

_A final comment: I finished Tomb Raider 2013 last weekend. Good lord, she kills a lot of bloody people._

* * *

The hike through the forest was exhausting in its impossible humidity.

Trees with fronds as large as her torso surrounded them at times, other times they traversed down corridors of tree-trunks that had only the periodic branch obscuring their view. The path, if it could be called that, was as varied likewise, with the initial outset being primarily one of grass and moss atop pliable soil, so rich in its nutrients that the forest carpet made a slight squelching sound as they trampled it with their boots. As the tree density increased, so too did the difficulty of their path, with the floor becoming obscured by thick, knotted roots like massive ropes that had been laid as rebar for the cyclopean trees' construction.

Earlier in the day, after everyone had awoken, they had made short work of breakfast, a small but workable oddend the two volunteers had provided. After that, they set out almost immediately. Lara thought she sensed surprise from Snake when she took the lead and laid out the ground rules for everyone, firmly but not commanding. They should stay within visual radius of the person in front of them, and call out if they needed to stop for any reason. Single file seemed obvious, and there were no objections.

For a time, Lara thought it would be through dry land, and they might be capable of making a straight shot to the downed plane, but after a few miles, this illusion was shattered by an expanse of wetland that had engulfed the fullness of their path, and they would have no choice but to go around.

"Normally, I'd be all for staying dry," Otacon said, "but I know we can't waste time. If you guys wanted to try and cut straight through the water—"

Lara smiled. She thought it endearing he would put aside his comfort. But it was Vines shook his head, and it was Ellie who interrupted him. "Not a chance. Aside from the leeches, there's alligators, even in the shallow waters." Their line of travel had come to a stop, and all save Snake moved in for the brief palaver.

"Alligators?" Lara asked. "How? This can't be a very conducive habitat for them."

"They've started moving out of the Pampas. There's a lot of tourist activity there, and it's changed the ecosystem in a way nobody in the area's studied yet."

Lara continued walking, looking at the reeds and overgrowth that the water housed. It was hardly clear, but still mostly transparent, primarily green with aquatic schrubs obscuring the view a bit. "There's not a chance—"

"No, this marsh is probably free of them. Too few fish, too much growth. But snakes love enclosed water sources like this. I don't want to have to treat any more snake bites." Vines said. He pointed to the water, where some of the reeds drifted of their own accord. Lara could feel no breeze, and she saw nothing in the water but its ripples.

After that, there was no more discussion of it.

Later, they paused, stopping for a break to exchange water. They sat on logs and on the ground, in a loose circle, and just as Ellie and Vines began to stop, Lara put her hand up.

"Actually," she said, "if you two don't mind, I'd like to have a word with my partners for a moment about finances. You know, their hazard pay, that sort of thing." She did her best to look sheepish. It worked, and with understanding, they camped a few feet away for the duration.

"We're your flunkees now, huh?" Snake was lighting a cigarette, and Lara thanked him for being downwind.

"I'm insulted," Otacon smiled, and she felt his peaceable demeanor distract her from the heat.

"Oh, you two don't give me grief over being in the boys club, would you?" She heard Snake snicker a laugh as she began to tighten her boots. "I've a few questions, if that's alright."

"Sure," Snake said. "Shoot."

"Actually, I meant for Hal."

Snake grumbled, and Otacon laughed.

"We were talking earlier when you were asleep, Hal, and I've been thinking about all this business of the nature of… well, superweapons, I suppose is the term? What we're going to do, once we have the supplies, and what would this mean for the other parts of South America. Brazil, Paraguay and so on."

Snake's lip lifted, his eyes scowled. "Bolivia and Paraguay coming to blows… that's an idea that'll keep me up at night."

"Well," Otacon began by adjusting his glasses. "There's a lot of reason to be concerned. Even if it is only publicized, and nothing comes to fruition, Metal Gear is still destabalising because it might affect Bolivian trade, which is almost entirely exports of minerals and gasses. Prices could be unpredictable, which might not seem very important in the long run, but Bolivia's got a fragile economy, and most of their imports/exports are also from and to the US. If trade relations break down, Bolivia'd really take a beating. There's also a bad history of military concerns like Snake said."

Snake picked up the thread. "Apparently a lot of revolutionary fighters have passed through the country from other nations, holdovers from ideologues around the seventies. It's America's backyard Vietnam, at least in as much there's a lot of people with guns who don't like talking out their problems."

"There's a bigger concern then either of those, I'm afraid." Lara said. "Bolivia's got a lot of rural poor. If a would-be coup goes under, or aggression flares…"

Otacon nodded. "Yeah, it'd create a power vacuum that would end up with the locals suffering, regardless of who they back."

"The locals always suffer," Snake said.

"Right," Lara said. "So I take it we get in, destroy it without incident, and perhaps have a bit of fun in the process. And what of the name?"

"Well," Otacon started, "Nothing too trigger happy. I'd like to get evidence once the thing's down. Those didn't look like my locomotion plans at all."

"What?" Snake said, "In the legs?"

"Yeah. I'd built REX with a very specific sort of locomotive design theory in mind, so I don't know how or why they'd modify it so efficiently. It's almost impossible to tell from here, but that thing looks almost like it would have predated my design somehow. All this Peace Walker stuff, though, that's beyond me"

"An alpha REX, so to speak, Hal?" Lara said

"Yeah. I suppose Alpha's as good a classification as any, for the time being anyway. But check that out. You can tell along the knee joint, since I used a traditional biped movement, these legs look like they wouldn't have enough stability for extended periods." Otacon paused mid-lecture. "We're probably not going to get to go public with this one. There's too many factors. I'm sorry."

"Hal, we can't let these people just build one of your—" She caught herself, but not fast enough to avoid hurting him. Otacon winced at her language, so she thought it best to try and correct and keep forward. "—one of _these_ things. Aside from trashing the bloody thing, is there anything else we could do?"

Snake stood, and Lara thought later perhaps he'd caught on to Otacon's instinctual recoil at her word choice. "If we can bring a piece of the damn thing back, maybe there's some use we could get out of it. If they've got engineers on site, they have to have blueprints. And if they have blueprints—"

Otacon brightened, as it dawned on him. His shoulders raised, eyes grew wide "Then maybe we could study where they got the plans."

"Trace it back to the source? You lads can't be serious. That'd be phenomenal."

"Wait a second," Snake said. "Nobody get ahead of themselves. Let's give it a shot, but nobody get their hopes up. We still don't even know what this thing's capable of yet, or what it's going to be like getting in. I don't have any experience with rainforest infiltration—"

"Is there such a thing?" Lara asked.

"—And they don't exactly seem friendly. We have to recognize we don't have the luck of being stuck under the umbrella of a group with a hell of a lot of resources." Snake let out a wisp of smoke. It disappeared into the slight breeze that was casting through the forest.

"Alright, you're right." Lara sighed, and stood with Snake. His cigarette was finished, and she felt a little less overheated. "Let's go."


	21. PART ONE: CHAPTER 16

It was another hour into the hike when the rain started. It fell in small bursts, patters of droplets coming down off the tapered edges of the fingertips of a billion branches, and much less of it falling directly on them from the sky. The moisture their clothes had accumulated had probably been dew by proxy of a multitude of leaf and bark. The rain came down in thin mists that drizzled through the air, half tumbling and half drifting, wafting to the ground almost like smoke. The air's humidity was lessened only in temperature. Viridian mingled with blue with black with the transitory rumours of silver downpour. The rainfall had driven out most of the soundtrack that had been largely a product of avians, the odd, distant mammalian cry, and the rustle of trees swaying in the wind.

They had been silent for most of the hike, the heat and its unremitting vampirism like a pall that could not be uncast. Lara had only spoken to Snake once during the long walk, a request for canteen he'd been carrying as given by Vines. They'd become temporary mates of a sort, with tobacco as refuge.

When Snake, behind her by a few feet, reached out and grabbed her by the arm, she stopped abruptly, almost leaping from the surprise. She hadn't heard or felt him close the gap between them.

When Lara turned to face him, she watched his eyes shift. To their periphery. She asked no questions vocally. When Snake answered with furrowed brow, she paused, extending out her sense to what she might not have been observant of.

She could smell his tobacco, his sweat, her own. The life of the jungle in aromas clean and the overgrowth pungent.

Her mouth tasted dry, bitter. The air was sweet like tea.

The ground beneath them was soggy, florid, pliant.

The forest was silent.

From her left, her right, metal clicked.

Snake's voice was the last she heard.

"GET DOWN!"

The jungle exploded from all sides with blooming curses of sulfur, toluene, exertions of gunpowder ripping open the world with sound and supernoval flashes that vomited from guns on all sides. To the left and right of their immediate "path", the reports shouted from rifles and sub machinegun fire. It engulfed her aural senses, and she could hear nothing else, the shouting of Portuguese and Spanish and English as punctuation marks in a sentence that made no sense. Lara's own self awareness was minimised by that dominion of sound, the cacophony a ruin of coherency. She felt her throat tense and vibrate with her yells, but heard it only in the way one hears their inner monologue. Dirt blew out of the ground in tufts of burst soil and grass. Bark snapped from the trees like skin ripped from a body, small roughshod explosions pockmarking their omniscient forms.

Lara scrambled up the ground to the base of one of the trees, making only the barest assessment of where their fire had been concentrated from. Everyone had happened too fast. She understood in abstract there was gunfire but that why or how or what it meant was absurd. It was always the same. They could have been using laser beams, the reality of gunfire so removed. The truth of it was ridiculous; Gas and fire made metal pebbles fly. But she did not detach or remove herself. She knew how they worked, why. Bringing herself out of a reptilian response took no time.

For a moment, she felt the urge to panic. Just for a heartbeat.

Lara pulled the pistol from her hip.

When she began to fire slightly blindly from around the tree, she pushed out the periphery ideas. The sound of the reports, their volume. The screaming of her companions. She felt a calm steal over her, and, little as she cared to ruminate on it, an excitement. Adrenaline overflowed her bloodstream and drove out the imperfections. It supercharged each muscle into fibrous mercury. Her heart pounded pistons of fuel into the rest of her, and a type of exhilarated anger seeped in, not a coherent thought but a feeling, like an emotion, that this unknown opposition could_ threaten_ the five of them like that. But it was also rapture, not in action but clarity. There was so few times when life ensconced itself into such simplicity; survival made binary.

In stealing just a second, she wondered if that was how Snake felt.

When she looked directly ahead of her, bandanna tight around his skull, teeth gritted, sweat pouring off the contours of his jawline and into the runnels of stubble that lined his face, she saw a reflection, and knew it was true.

"Snake!" Otacon crawled with rough fervor to Snake, pressing himself against the tree's base along with them. Each report caused a wince, a squinting of eyes. His glasses were askew but still present, and dirt blew out past and on him in bits with other forest debris. Lara was aware of this in passing, between firing off a shot or two behind her own column of bark.

Her ears cleared, or maybe acclimated, enough for her to make out her own voice at least. The fire did not taper but ceased its constancy when it was apparent Lara and Snake were willing and capable of shooting back.

Otacon stared at her, mouth slightly open, teeth gritted and with a wild desperation in his eyes. When she turned away to return fire, she saw Otacon shout something, but it was too late. His pleas were drowned out in the kicking auditory violence that bellowed and snarled from her gun.

Lara took aim, and stared through the brush, the fronds, the miles of green noise. Three assailants on her side, maybe four. She couldn't even estimate how many Snake's side of the corridor had. They had submachine guns pressed against their shoulders, and multicoloured cloths draped around their mouths, but otherwise were clothed only in shorts and in thin strappy shirts. Most were gaunt, wiry with muscle. They spotted her dart from her cover spot, digging her boots into the ground beneath her and setting her shoulders to grip the pistol with both hands, and they took cover of their own. They sidled behind brush and fanned out in the process. When she fired, she felt the vibration run up her arm, jumping like an electrical current from joint to joint, and she had to refocus her eyes after she ducked back behind her tree. They were playing defensively now, and that was an advantage in and of itself.

"Lara! Snake! Stop! What are you doing?!"

"What do you think? We have to take them out!" Snake's voice was immensely easier to hear than Otacon's, and he roared over the competing landslide of sound. "We don't have time for this—" was all he got out before fire bloomed again, and they took what little cover they had, shoulders rising as if to attempt protection for their heads.

Snake hadn't yet fired in any extended fashion, and attempted to follow Lara's lead by taking a bead from behind the tree and firing from a relatively safe position. She watched, in just those few shorts seconds, as the younger of the two men began his play, but her objection was lost to the gunfire, and she couldn't have closed the distance between the three of them long enough to stop him. Otacon threw his body on Snake's arm, yanking him to the ground in the process. It was short work of shoving Otacon off him, bodily, but had to pull the both of them back behind the tree.

Before they could speak again, Snake got to his feet. Otacon attempted again to reason with the older man, and found himself slugged in the mouth before there was even a chance to make a syllable. It was shocking enough that Otacon's legs folded, and he slumped on the ground from the force of the blow. No sooner had the blow landed than Snake met Lara's eyes and outshouted their opposition.

"We've got to shut them down!" Another volley of submachine fire exploded. Snake winced, teeth barely in fury, and met her eyes once more.

"I've got a better idea of how many we've got! I can lead us out!" Lara glanced to her left, and to Snake's right, as she saw the other two members of their fellowship inchworm towards their location. "You two, stay with Hal!"

"How many?" Snake said.

Her reply was swallowed by the submachineguns, but she also held up her four fingers twice. _Eight._

"Got it!" He said.

"Snake, can you cover my sides? And hold this?" Lara flipped the safety on and slid the pistol to his feet.

He nodded agreement to both. "I'll follow your lead! On my mark!" Snake holstered the gun and took a combat stance, pistol between both palms and drawn to the ground. His mouth tightened into a cruel line, his eyes became like holes. Lara turned away from him, and looked up the tree.

"Ready!" she said.

The gunfire took its briefest respite.

"NOW!"

Lara leapt up the tree, both hands on either of its broad side, and scampered up it. In just a few heartbeats, she was maybe nine, ten feet from the ground, and began the rapid process of making for one of the branches. The tree was rough on her hands; fingernail ends splintered, the barbs of trees drew blood. The gunfire resumed, and she could feel its draft run beyond her legs, but she also felt the blood in her come to a rich concentration. Her heart's valve became pistons, her muscles made steel. She leapt from the tree's torso to its arm, swinging up and up and over, making a full circle once and stripped the palms of her hands of the outermost layer of skin in the process before she released, flying forward in an arc from her first branch to the next, making a rapid crescent in her inertia and letting go once more, sending herself hurtling to the forest floor.

Below her, she understood in abstract Snake's own advance. He had moved rapidly from his initial spot and opened up the fire, spacing out his shots and driving the gunmen back, providing for her cover to move. He darted from their first tree, let loose a handful of shots, moved to the next, but never pausing.

Lara tumbled to the ground, coming into a roll and within arm's length of the closest assailant. He took aim as she moved to a crouch, and, still bent, she swung one leg out from beneath her, sweeping it across the backs of his legs like a scythe. She followed the momentum with her body's weight, half attack and half Arabesque, coming to a standing position only long enough to be confronted with another man, his eyes wide. They narrowed, and she dove for him, extending her hands out in flat palm. Submachine-gun strapped around his chest, he had no chance to raise it: Lara sent him toppling backwards, using his ribcage as a springboard for a frontwards sommersault, legs cartwheeling over her head to continue the momentum lest they end up collapsed on each other.

In the time it took for her to subdue the two men closest to her, Snake had closed the gap, as the other six men began training themselves on her. Two let their backs to him, and he fired without pause, bullets blowing out the thin cloth with red spray. The first tumbled forward, spitting bullets as he crashed to the ground and the second turned on Snake, still capable. Snake fired again, and the man's hand blew apart. A third shot finished the sortie.

Lara watched the remainder begin a shared scream and spit their fire at her. She dipped into a roll, snagging a submachinegun in the process. She waited out the gunfire, then returned her own fire, advancing on the four men grouped amongst three trees. Her newly acquired firearm tried to muzzlejump from her hands, and emptied its payload in mere seconds. They retreated, and she took her thin window. "Snake! I need that back!"

Snake pulled leather and let fly her gun.

Lara snatched it from the air, flipped the safety, and fired. One man scattered, disappearing into the trees. Lara took no interest, and Snake was behind cover at the time. As Lara closed in, so too did Snake, and they traded periods of fire. When Lara was within just a few feet, one leapt out and was summarily cut down by Snake's pistol fire.

Snake was barely hidden via a massive balsa when the last two men went berserk, leaping out from behind a pair of shrubs and sacrificing the little ammunition they had left. As one exhausted his supply and began to reload, Lara had already positioned herself closest and drew both their attention, but at that point, it was too late. She snatched the unclasped submachinegun free of his hands, snapping it from his grip and yanking it free with a blow to the man's throat and then his breastbone. In the process, they had turned with her back to the last man, and she froze when she heard the thick click of metal being trained on her.

"Congelar! Dar la vuelta!"

Lara stopped, dropping the weapon. She was aware for the first time of a snag in her throat, like a hook, and her lungs became stone. Stomach knotted, she felt like vomiting. Lara put her hands up, and as she turned to face him, his eyes desperate and furious, she watched as Snake crept behind him. Snake's command chilled even her.

"Dispara su pistola y se muere. Dejar caer!"

The jungle was silent. Nothing moved.

"He dicho dejar caer!"

"Demonio," he said, almost seeming to mutter it. He did not let go of his gun, but slowly, he did turn, facing Snake, muzzle of his firearm at the forest floor. Slowly, dreamlike in its pause, he pulled the fabric from his in front of his mouth. The gunman's eyes stared beyond the pistol at his head and into Snake's gaze, seeming emboldened, wild.

Some feet from them, she saw the underbrush move. Otacon staggered out into the open, rubbing his mouth, eyes searching. When he spotted Snake holding the man at gunpoint, he shouted.

"Everybody wait just a bit." Then, almost as an afterthought, Lara said, "Espere un momento."

In the distance, Otacon's eyes widened, arm outstretched, and he shouted "SNAKE!"

The gunman's mouth contorted into a rictus. His grip on the gun became a vice. "DEMONIO!"

Lara reached out to them, knowing it did not matter. "Snake! D—"

The shot was cataclysmic. Blood sprayed her chest, and she recalled its hideous warmth. Of feeling it for the first time on her skin. Before the three of them, the body slumped to the ground, head snapped back, hair a tangle of what once had been. There was a vast space between them. When the man she had just physically disarmed began to collect himself, she watched idly as Snake did not hesitate, snatching him by the hair and snapping his pistol over the last assailant's mouth. She did not try to help. Lara felt like all this had happened to someone before. She knew it would happen again.

She looked at the body. His shoes were sandals with rawhide lacing themselves up his leg.

To her right, she thought she heard Otacon's breath hitch.

When Vines came over and began to move the body, she let her pistol slide back into the holster, her head clearing somewhat. Otacon he disappeared into the jungle nearby, but she could hear his presence. Ellie was helping Vines, and Snake was securing the captive with rope Vines had provided him. After a few minutes, when the smell of toluene left her nostrils, Lara joined Vines and Ellie in the preparation of bodies. Ellie had a machete that she released from its scabbard, and began cutting off schrubs for a cairn. The ground was too knotty with roots for a burial, and when they laid them to rest, Vines spoke prayers in Arabic.

Otacon retreated, without a word.

They did their acts in silence.

After a time, the birds came back, and the forest began again its constant singsong breathing.

* * *

When they had finished up the filthy business the fight had left behind, she pulled Snake aside. He was smoking more than he had been earlier. In just a bit over an hour, he'd had almost five cigarettes.

"Do you have a plan in mind?" Lara absentmindedly wiped the sweat from her forehead, her cheek. She tried not to think of the gunman, and the blood against her eyes, in her mouth. She found it possible, and that disturbed her more than the sensation she'd been trying to block out.

"Get to the plane. It's all we can do. We might have eight hours until sundown, which seems like more than it is, especially since we don't know the lay of the land, and we're in the home territory of whoever those guys were. If we want to get headed wherever we're going, we're going to need those supplies first. If that happens again after sundown, we don't have a chance. By the end of that skirmish, I had about half a clip left. I can't imagine you've got much more."

"I don't." A strand of hair fell in front of her face, and Lara blew it back, then shifted it behind her ear with one hand. "How far do you think we have left to go?"

"Not sure." Snake inhaled deeply of the tobacco, and flipped it into a bush. They were standing on a slight incline, which made watching their encampment easier, and she had her back to it. "What are you going to do with that tosser you tied to a tree?"

"Nothing for the time being. If he's still here when we come back, I'd like to find out more about the Boys, but I don't think that's going to happen. The best thing to come out of that is that we know what we're up against, hopefully."

"I'm not sure I like the odds." She looked back to the temporary day camp they'd set up, with Ellie and Vines having let their packs sit against a log. Otacon was watching them while Ellie and Vines went over a map and a compass.

"Do you think Otacon will be alright?"

"I don't know. He's tough, and he's been through this before, but…"

"Don't overestimate him. Being through a, a.. terrorist attack isn't the same as seeing you…" Lara searched herself for the words.

"Murder somebody?"

Lara said nothing.

"I know it's going to affect him. I didn't have a choice. He'll have to deal with it, we're not exactly rich with options."

"I know that." Lara sighed. They both turned, standing aside each other, to watch from their quiet perch

"You did good out there. Thank you."

"I did what I had to do."

"I know." He hesitated. Thought perhaps of his own experiences. If he did, she couldn't tell. "I'm sorry."

"You know the worst part, Snake?"

"Yeah?"

"Every time you do it, it gets a little easier."

The adrenaline that had tapered out of her system like an illness that carried rich aphrodisia that was as nauseating as it was elating. She felt like pressing herself against him, and knew it was for all the wrong reasons, things that had nothing to do with him as a person. It was a warped version of what she had felt at the mansion, and when Vines closed the map and approached them both, she was grateful for that strange refuge.

"Hate to break up the plotting, but Ellie and I'd like to shove off, if it's alright." He looked to Snake. "Nice shooting out there."

Snake said nothing.

"Is your friend going to be alright, Lara? Hal, isn't it?"

"I hope so. Thank you, Mr. Vines."

"'Salright. I know this might not be the best time to tell you either of this, but we've decided it might be best to part ways after we've shown you to your former craft. It's not cowardice, mind, but we're neutral parties in this country."

"Wouldn't want you to get your hands dirty." Snake said, barely under his breath.

"Excuse me? I think I've seen enough of you to know how clean your methods are, so let's keep the comments to yourself." He leaned forward, catching Snake's eyes. "There's rumors of a man like you all over the middle east. The Iraq mountain ranges, Afghanistan, Iran. What'd you say your name was? Plissken?"

Snake glared something venomous into Vines' eyes. "Are you with the ADF?"

"Not anymore. Not for a long time, mate." Vines teeth were gritted, his thin features hawklike. "There's stories of a man just like you over there. I bet _Plissken's_ not the name they refer to you as. Is it, _Saladdin?_"

From Snake, Lara heard a growl that sounded as diamonds being ground into a powder. It sounded like hate. It was obvious he now had Snake's full attention.

"That's not my name," Snake said.

Lara shoved herself between the two of them, feeling disgust rise up with remarkable rapidity. "I have had enough, from both of you! Save it for some other time, we don't need this!"

Vines clicked his tongue, and turned back to Lara. "I don't care why the three of you are here, but I'm no soldier, and I'm certainly not with Che's Boys. We're taking you only as far as the plane. After that, you're on your own. Like everyone else."


	22. PART ONE: CHAPTER 17

When they came to the cargo plane almost an hour later, they were led there by a series of crates, broken and unbroken, and they spoke little.

The plane had disrupted the jungle so little that there was hardly a path where its descent and tumbled landing could be discerned, save for the broken branches that led up to their approach of the wreck. One of its wings had been torn off, its primary shaft had all of the small rectangular windows blown out, and jagged metal wounds ran open on its body. Every crevice and nook was filled with snapped twigs and brush, chlorophyll like emerald blood surrounding the points where the plane had made shredded pulp of the jungle's life. The remaining wing had its engine stuffed with the chewy spinach that had jammed inside during the fall, engine blades as broken teeth. The plane laid like a beaten corpse tangled with busted foliage and cutting a swatch deep into the forest, nose tipped into an inland lake. The lake itself gave no clearing for the sky, its marshy shallows only enough that thin, long stalks of verdantcy grew upwards into great fronds.

To one side of the plane, in a patch of dry soil, there lay a pair of stony piles in long oblongs, with thick logs jammed at their base. None of them asked what was inside the piles; no need. Otacon went to them almost immediately, sullen, wordless. He looked at them for a long time, and no one stopped him, nor did they begin to rummage through the plane without him. Snake took this as a smoke break, Vines and Ellie held their own council whilst taking prone on a log. After a bit, Lara approached, placing her hand on his shoulder.

"Hal."

Otacon began rubbing the ridge of his nose under his glasses. "Yeah, I'm okay." He turned to look at her, away from the twin cairns. "Thanks. Thank you." Otacon looked past her, to Snake. He was sitting against a tree, one elbow propped on a bent knee. "He's a hard guy to like. You know that?"

"I'm getting that impression, mm. We can talk about it later, right?"

They returned to the area at hand, and moved to close in on the tree.

To her right, Lara heard a click, and when she'd turned, Snake was already taking stance. He had moved ahead of everyone else by the time they came within ten metres. "Lara," Snake said.

She unholstered her weapon, held one hand up. The other three stopped and hung back, with Vines looking resigned but impatient. She thought, had they the resources, giving him a firearm might not be a bad idea.

Snake held his pistol at waist height upon approach, footfalls careful, seeming to pay no mind to the world around him but careful to step around twigs, loose bark, anything that could make a sound. His eyes could not be discerned, save for the duskyness surrounding them, the deeply set blue shimmers below shadowed brow. Snake's shoulders even sat differently on his bones, not stiff but coiled. Just a couple feet between them, and she felt a shared sent of predation. In the plains of Africa, she'd accompanied once a big game hunter, and aside from the disdain for which she had held her company, Lara felt as though there was a distinct lack of real predatory nature to the act. Tracking with a rifle in hand against animals who could not fight back with even chance was a far cry from observing an animal's natural prowl for forage, for food. But, against any rational discerning, that was what she felt like now.

Like hunting with an animal.

In the fall, there were a pair of logs that had been felled and lay as obstacles, large and thick enough that getting over them quietly was almost impossible, but it took only a moment. Lara was surprised when Snake took her hand to help her over, but it seemed only a prudent courtesy to avoid noise: They returned attention elsewhere as soon as it had been passed.

Once within a few feet, Snake changed stance, training his gun forward and slowing what was already a very cautious gait. The mouth of the plane's cargo bay jutted open and at queer angle toward them, sides burnished with green and in some spaces stripped of the white paint that had formerly covered its exterior. It was unusual for Lara to have to approach with such caution, not out of unwillingness in the past for discretion but out of lack of necessity. Most of her expeditions were replete with animals, but hardly cause for human violence. There had been periods where unsavoury mercenary sorts had made life difficult, but this almost constant threat was neither familiar nor alien. Unusual, and distinctly unpleasant fit the bill. It reminded, and discomfited, her of the difference in their lives.

Lara listened for unusual sounds, or lack of sound. Strange things that could indicate human artifice, or their passing presence, and found little. It was clear at least to her that no ambush lay in wait, or that there had been no visitors beyond the transitory relief workers they'd left some meters back. No broken strains of grass, or bootprints, and in wet soil, it would have been almost impossible to hide such signs. Snake seemed to satisfy his own skepticism likewise, because in a moment, he ceased gripping the pistol in both hands, and holstered it. On this sight, Lara did likewise.

"It's clear! Come on over!" He shouted.

It was only when the other three followed their path that it became apparent how silent they'd been. Otacon, Vines, and Ellie's approach sounded like nothing less than the stomping of ill-mannered toddlers through an alley made of glass. The unsubtlety amused her, even if she did catch sight of a slight consternation draw over Snake's features.

The next hour or so was a careful bustle in and out of the plane, careful in part because of the slant that the plane had entered the glorified pond, although no water had managed to enter but parts of the cockpit. A lot of their gear had survived: Otacon's portable computer equipment had mostly made the transfer. They also found a crowbar, the only thing that had kept them from making a point of opening the crates that they had disembarked mid-flight. There was the flat smartpad he'd made use of at the airport, and the wearable keyboard was paired with it, which he immediately strapped around one forearm. There were also food supplies, which Snake voiced significant interest in, and survival goods along with Jeep maintenance equipment. The clearing operation took more than a few trips in and out of it, and opening the two crates that had been left behind was more difficult than it had to be: They needed to be opened inside the plane, since moving them was impossible. They were too big to lift without a pully system of some sort, and the incline made it even worse, as they had tumbled and jammed on the breach wall separating the cargo bay from the central hall and cockpit.

After they had finished, they were covered in sweat. Vines had taken off his shirt for the work, and Otacon's t-shirt was spotted with dark patches of moisture under the arms, the small of his back. A short break followed suit. Snake dolled out the packaged food they'd unpacked, small plastic satchels of imitation chicken ala king, and packets of juice. Vines and Ellie seemed the most famished, and mentioned running low on supplies prior. Snake offered half of the food haul, and they agreed gratefully.

Once they'd finished, Snake again asked for Lara in consul.

"I need you to—" He placed a cigarette in his mouth and began to produce his lighter. By the time he had, Lara had yanked it from his mouth and crushed it underfoot. He accepted this with a small groan but nothing more. "—to keep this quiet. Because I don't like it, and it sounds worse when you say it out loud."

"Bloody…I don't like the sound of this. I also don't like the idea that we're keeping our own little conference every five minutes. Why don't we just talk to Otacon? I mean, I understand those two-"

"I think those guys were never meant to take us out."

"Snake?"

"Think about it. If they believe we're with that private security company, why would they send so few people? If we were a unit, we'd have mopped them off the floor." Snake was producing another

"I don't understand…" But she did. She was starting to. A feeling like a knotted muscle was coalescing in her abdomen.

"We'd have been heavily armed, and we'd have them beat not just in manpower, but in sheer hardware. Those guys were just…" Even Snake seemed reluctant to voice it. "Farmers with guns."

"So what do this mean?"

Snake hesitated. Produced another cigarette. Lara hadn't the heart to take it from him, nor the energy. The end of it burned to life, glimmering reddish light on the tree they'd stood behind to shield them from the others.

Lara could feel it creeping up on her, and hated the slow way she'd put it out of mind. How, after the sickly adrenaline had worn off, she'd shut it out in favour of the goal they'd needed to accomplish, justifying it so easily. And so willingly.

"Either they don't think we're with Araignée, or they were sent to test our capabilities," he said.

Lara covered her mouth. Her jaw clenched. Her eyes squeezed shut.

"Oh god. Snake. That's…"

Snake said nothing. He inhaled deeply.

"Snake, they were sent to die. For us to kill them"

"Yeah." He exhaled. "Yeah. Because whoever's got this Peace Walker thing wants to know what we can do. Who we are. They probably sent the freshest recruits they had."

Her eyes snapped open, and the anxiety of the conceit left her, if only for the moment.

"Snake," she said. "You can't tell Otacon. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

Snake looked down at the soil. His face took a shadow, and in his eyes she saw someone very old and very, very tired. "I know."


	23. PART ONE: CHAPTER 18

A Note:

Bloody damn thing took forever. Sorry, as always, it's late; no reason for excuses. Double Dutch Update tomorrow, because updating via Kinkos is hardly ideal.

* * *

After the conversation collapsed, limp as a corpse, Lara took her leave of him, and made her way back to the others. She found there to be a solace in a comfort of people who were not Snake. His presence was not one that indentured her sense of empathy, nor did she imagine he cared to have it. If there were any understanding between them about a mutual interest, she didn't know it; too much noise. There was the forest and the others and the crash and her own cobbled thoughts, thick as stones, planted firmly in the demands of her strange discontent. This new information didn't dissaude any regard for him, but it was not the time nor place. It shamed her somewhat to have to constantly remind herself that comfort was not an option, but the shame, a feeling that she had only briefly felt when she thought of those gone and lost, burrowed further down than that. It was the culminative vagaries of shame, guilt made into Ouroborous, and the anger that she might need comfort for once. It wasn't long before she had no choice but to let the thought of being manipulated to kill settle in her with waves of malicious nauseation. Moreover, she felt a wild, self-serving regret. Regret of coming with them, of agreeing, of thinking this would be perhaps a bit more loud version of her normal exploits, if they could be called that. The presumptiveness of her actions, and their summarily clear hindsight, did not please her. She was made of sterner stuff, certainly. But the environ fealt alien in its familiarity, and that sensation did not settle as she thought it would throughout the rest of the day. It compacted itself, like wet sand.

For a brief time, Lara caught herself watching Otacon. If he felt likewise. If he wondered how he had agreed to a pact made with a man who had killed and would kill again.

Each of Otacon's eyes were half lidded.

His shoulder lay slumped, mouth slackened the smallest bit, and his body covered in the same unweildy moisture they had all collected. Cut on his mouth from the crash still noticeable, bleeding again from having to chew.

She let his silence maintain itself, maddening it may have been.

When a time passed and they'd eaten, Snake had returned after a few minutes to himself, so Lara cleared her throat. Ellie's head raised, but no one else.

"Yes?" Ellie said. Then, after a moment, "Miss?"

Lara stifled a laugh, not because of the unusual word choice but that she knew the adrenaline was tapering off, that it was the hysteria of secret knowledge causing impromptu humour. It made her angry again at no one but herself, and she used the anger to smother any of the stresses barking internally.

"Malcolm Vines, is it?"

He looked up, hair covering his eyes a bit, and he had to push the oily strands out of his eyes to meet hers. "Right. Have you something?"

"I do, actually. I'd like to hire you."

For a moment, no one said anything.

"In case it is not abundantly apparent, we have planned our South American exploratory photography session remarkably poorly, and we are officially in a war zone. You seem to have a certain familiarity with the armed forces, undoubtedly from your time as a _relief worker,_-," and at this, Vines' looked surprised. Lara restrained any smugness. "- and my companion Mr. Plissken thinks you have fine credentials." She ignored the teeth-gritted glares she received from Snake. Otacon and Ellie, on the other hand, looked enrapt. "So I'd like to keep you on as a medic, of a sort. If Ellie should need an escort, I'd be happy to provide one. I'd love to have you both on as a sort of medical go-to, but-"

"You'd create too much of a profile out here." Ellie finished. Lara was immensely grateful she didn't have to lie any more than necessary.

"Exactly, thank you, Ellie. I don't like the idea of traveling without someone of medical training. And you know the terrain remarkably well, as I'm sure you both do, Mister Vines. Would you say that's accurate?"

"Of course."

"And what do you say, then?" Lara asked.

Lara hid all surprise.

"Sure," he said.

"Excellent, then it's settled. I'm going to take Hal with me, if he has no objections-"

"No, none." In his surprise, Otacon seemed to have livened somewhat.

"-So that we might go open those crates." She tried her best not to wince when she said his peusdonym again. "Plisskin will be more than happy to stay with you, I should think, in case anything happens."

Before there was any more chatter of it, Lara and Otacon had risen as Snake began a very truncated protest, and they were off in the bush again with a filthy crowbar.

The clawing inside her head was clearing, a rapidity she was hardly satisfied with but none the less grateful for, and the air cooling in spite of the heat. She thought she heard a thunderclap miles and miles off, but couldn't be sure. The sound was felt more than heard, in brief echoing reverberations in the earth and the shiver of leafy overgrowth. Lara thought of the balm the rain would bring, how it might feel against her bare skin if she had no one around, and let herself fantasise as little a chance as there was it would happen. Rain seemed like teasing without release, and she felt solace from humidity's frustration only by the dim hope it would pour.

"Wow. What was that about?" Otacon jarred her from the ephemeral idea that she'd concocted of a downpour, and was surprised by the vividness of it. Maybe she needed escape that much. It'd been a long time since there had been a scenario so draining in such a short time.

"I'm sorry, Hal, I didn't mean to jump to something without consulting either of you." She wasn't sorry, not in the least, but for now it would be enough to say so. She didn't need to do either, as it turned out.

"Actually, I don't mind. We're in this together or not at all, I guess. I didn't really examine it too closely, I mean." He pushed the glasses up his nose. Lara could hear the effort of every climb over hollowed, felled trees in his breathing. Little tufts of strain. "It just came out of nowhere. Any reason for it?"

"Yeah. Snake and Vines got into it, and they both let it slip about each other, although nothing I can make out. Thought you might have some insight?" Lara stepped over an errant bout of knotted roots.

"Sure, what'd they say?"

"Well, after they'd finished sabre-rattling, so-to-speak, Vines said something about a warlord?"

"Warlord?"

"Mn, if I remember right, I think so." Lara pointed to a thick, waist-high crate glimmering steel in the underbrush, and Otacon nodded as they began in its direction. "Aside from the soldierly connotations, it mean anything? Remarked there were rumours of a... Saladdin, if that makes any sense? I can't imagine we're talking the Muslim conqueror, here. Has Snake ever had that code-name?"

"No, not that I know of. I can't begin to imagine what it means. I know he infiltrated Iraq in the early nineties, but beyond that, I don't have the foggiest."

"Mm, right then. How about this: Snake mentioned something about- Hal, careful, there, bloody sneakers aren't meant for this part of the world-about the ADF."

"Oh, man, that one I know. The Australian Defense Force."

"That makes sense, given the accent. Prison colony jokes aside, do you know anything about them?"

"Aside from the emphasis on Defense, not terrible. The ADF are traditionally a supplementary force with the would-be allied powers. The US, UK, that sort of thing. They've been around a long time, but they serve sorta as Brazil's military, you know?"

"My, you're a wellspring of information, Hal. I'm impressed. Although you're starting to sound a bit like Snake, I must say." They'd come to one of the crates, and Otacon began leaning on it, having worked up a slight lather. "Let's rest a moment. Are you doing okay?"

Otacon leaned forward and mopped his forehead with the lower front of his t-shirt."Yeah, I just wasn't really ready for this much activity. I'll make it." He let out a short clip of laughter, and the sound was more clean than Snake's, more young. She imagined Snake sounded grizzled even had he been Otacon's age, and the thought was amusing in its gallows pleasance. "I never thought I'd learn so much about the world's military presence. It's sort of disarming. He's left some of that stuff he knows in me a little, you know?"

She did.

Otacon cast his eyes downward, past his feet, past grass and soil and earth.

"Lara," he said. "Did you see..."

"Hm? What is it, Hal?"

"Did you watch him do it? I mean, the person back there. The..."

She waited.

And waited.

"The man Snake killed. Did you see his eyes when he did it?"

"I'm...afraid I don't understand the question."

"I need to know. If Snake..."

Lara hesitated, tried to take his stare."Hal, I think I know what you're asking. And although I have an answer for myself, you'll have to make that decision on your own." She paused and let out a sigh. Lara was beginning to see the appeal of smoking. "But I suppose that's not very helpful, is it?"

He shook his head.

"Hal, for what it's worth, no. No, I don't think Snake enjoys killing. I don't think he ever will." She thought about adding that unfortunately, Snake would almost certainly always be good at it, but thought better of it. "He... he did what he had to. If Snake enjoyed killing, there are places he could do that. It certainly wouldn't be like this." Lara felt very ill for a brief time as to what she imagined was in the crate. She hoped it would instead be the jeep repair kit she'd heard Otacon mention while dozing in and out of sleep aboard the plane, but she doubted it. "Here, give me a hand with this."

Lara planted the lip of the crowbar firmly in the corner of one of the crate's edges and hoped it would hold. This would be somewhat less easy than the others, as they hadn't taken to bending in odd mishapen cubes. This on the other hand had caved in almost entirely on one side, giving it a trapezoidal profile that Lara didn't care for. She did her best not to worry as to its contents. She'd know soon enough.

Otacon planted himself opposite Lara and took steady hold of one side, so he could push while Lara pulled. She managed to steal his sightline, and tried to peer into him. It was a marked change from Snake: every ounce of exhaustion sat behind his spectacles like murky seas. "Hal? I want you to know I'm glad you two came to me. For this, for all of it."

"Huh? Why? After everything that's happened so far, we're not even sure what we can do, if anything. Or what there is to do, aside from, well, sabotage I guess."

"Because..." Lara bit her lip, burrowing into herself for a reason. She found one. "Because this is awful. I don't want to lie to you. This is... hard. One of the harder things I've had to do. But it's the right thing to do. Okay? I want you to know you've done well. Thank you." She forced a smile, and found it easier than she expected. Natural, even. "Let's get this thing open, right?"

When Otacon smiled back, she felt at ease.

It didn't last long; a bitter taste of the knowledge of what Snake told her swarmed in through ragged fissures.


	24. PART ONE: CHAPTER 19

The crate had been lodged in the ground from the impact by a few inches, blue-tinged steel embedded into the ground. One corner had planted itself in the base of a tree. Otacon stood upright from leaning against it and Lara surveyed it one last time, wiping the moisture from her hands and gipping the crowbar near the bifurcated end of its curvature, Otacon gripping closer to the centre of it. Lara checked to make sure it was lodged securely in the slim division of the central panel and readied with Otacon, making sure he had secured his heels firmly in the earth, and then began counting down.

On three, Lara shifted all her weight to her back, to her legs, and shoved off with all her strength. Across from her beyond the crowbar's division Otacon was shoving it with both of his arms, visibly straining to such an extent his neck was veined and his face face reddened. Lara gritted her teeth, biceps straining against the leveraged steel, and when she heard the creek of its release, she leaveraged less of her strength against it. A few more tugs from Otacon and it was open.

Crowbar set aside, Lara began shuffling through the crate. She found the plastic explosives that had been packed, the firearms, a pair of binoculars, some other pyrotechnical odd ends. It was luck that none of them seemed worse for the wear; if there had been even a slight explosion, everything would have blown each other apart in the process. Weapons would have been out of the question. The worst that had come of it had been a few opened ammunition cases.

When she picked up one of the spare pistol that had been present, bringing up the total to four, Lara looked at Otacon only to find his face drained of colour. She sighed, patience thinning no matter the desire she felt for empathy.

"Hal. I know this is hard, but you're going to have to get used to them. Alright?"

In her periphery, she felt something in the back of her mind hum and click. When she focused on it, the sensation had disappeared, like a light blinking until spotted then its filament snapping too fast to watch.

Lara felt for something more in the brief time as Otacon nodded, and she found nothing.

Otacon made for the contents of the crate and began picking them up. When he struggled a bit with a harness for one of the assault rifles, she helped him strap it around his chest, finding it an odd sight that she chose not to remark upon. She was glad when he spoke up. "What are we going to do about either of them?"

"The ICRA people? I'm not sure our cover's going to hold, but I'm hoping bringing Vines aboard might remedy that somewhat."

Otacon adjusted the rifle strapped to him, shuffling with the discomfort of its weight. Lara had two around her, straps running between either breast, a third firearm holstered in her spare hip-strap, and the plastic explosives in a satchel she'd borrowed from Otacon taken from camp. "What about Snake?"

"He's just going to have to play nice with others. Right now we can't do this on our own. I'm more worried how a couple of relief workers are going to take it when we hand them a couple of firearms."

"We're giving them guns?" Otacon said.

"Do we have a choice?"

When Lara and Otacon returned to the camp, Snake and Vines had returned to a sense of amiable peace. Both men were smoking like it were a religious prayer, passing it between the two of them, and in the process Lara could see how easily Vines would have fit in, neck deep and covered in dirt, amongst a unit of militants. He was fresh of face, about Lara's age, but the easy comeraderie he had in spite or because of the tension with Snake made Lara feel thick for not seeing a military presence in him sooner.

When Ellie looked up from lacing up well-trodden boots to see them both looking as haphazard militia, she made a sound like laughter. "You two loaded for bear, huh?"

Lara began "Actually, we were hoping-"

She caught Snake's eyes, and the slight twitch of his neck.

"That we might be able to get rid of these," Lara said, "but for the time being thought it better to take them with us. Don't want to leave sharp sticks laying about, that sort of thing."

Daylight had been burned by much of the trips back and forth, and by the salvage, and there was hardly a discussion when Otacon suggested they start setting up a daycamp for when evening arrived. They could set out there seperate ways by morning.

"I'm afraid, sir, that's just not going to work," Ellie said.

"I'm sorry?" Otacon pushed the ridge of his glasses up the incline of his nose.

"Vines may not be coming back right away, but I've got to get back to the outpost we were staying. There are people there who need medical observation at specific intervals." Ellie was playing with a small, multi-knotted hairband that looked as a composite of several cannibalised other bands.

"What type of intervals? How long?" Snake said. He passed the third shared cigarette to Vines, who made no eye contact but took it without hesitation for a long pull.

"Well," Ellie said, "some need wounds changed, which isn't something we need to be there for, but others need treatment for regional ailments that I need to verify for dosage, and some have gangrene."

"Gangrene must be way too common out here," Otacon said.

"It is," said Vines. "Not to the people in Rurre, maybe, but this region is covered in rain nine months out of the year. Gangrene is a serious problem."

"And malaria?" Snake asked.

"Not as common as you'd think," Ellie said. "At any rate, I wanted to be back by or just after nightfall. If everybody hadn't been stable, we would have never have come out to check out the crash." She looked at Lara. "Again, no offense."

"None taken. You've your priorities." Lara looked to Snake, disregarding the pungent tobacco. "Have you any thoughts?"

"I'll take you," Snake said, tilting his chin to Ellie, "back to wherever you need to go. We'll return Vines in one piece, just a few days late. It'll also give me a chance to check out the Jeep, if I can find it."

"I know where it is," she said. "We crossed its path not far from here, but the walk's maybe half a day's hike if you're not using a zipline."

"Zipline?" Snake asked. "I didn't see any when we were coming down."

"There's one that crosses a ravine a few miles north. This area's foliage hides most of them, but they crisscross a lot of the terrain. I can even make you a map of the area from our outpost."

"What's at the outpost, anyway? Who's there?" Otacon asked.

"Farmers, mostly. People who live rurally who need care. A guerilla or two, but nobody who knows anything, if that's what you're thinking," Vines said.

Snake shook his head. "Nah, not my style to shake down the poor."

A dead silence.

When everybody laughed, Snake was the one surprised the most.


	25. PART ONE: CHAPTER 20

_Brief Comment: Computer and its workings seem to be in order. Updates on schedule._

_Thanks, as always, to those who keep coming back._

* * *

Lara set out the process before Snake and Ellie left, beginning by arranging a tent and its accoutrements near a tiny crest of an escarpment that could have been a cavern were it slightly more concave, with fronds laid at its peak and ferns at its base, while the others had likewise begun similar tasks of necessity. Snake was systematically checking the firearms for alteration, sitting crooked-kneed against a tree trunk, Otacon taking a more thorough stock of supplies, and Ellie & Vines sifting through their packs, all while they exchanged things they thought the other would need in the time apart.

She enjoyed listening to the mild chatter between Snake and Ellie, surprised somewhat by his candidness and her interest.

There was another, more immature feeling she noted in herself by their exchange that she chose not to acknowledge.

"How soon are you three planning to go back?" She said, checking a small, grungy device with yellow trim and touchscreen.

"As soon as we're finished, which I was hoping would be within a day or two." Snake had mercifully taken a brief reprieve from smoking. He'd broken apart one of the rifles and lain their innards, a series of springs and metal shafts and connecting viscera, on a handkerchief he'd borrowed from Ellie. He was checking every item individually, methodically, to the point of being near-obsessive save for the detached, quiet patience he was going about it.

"It's a shame you guys had to come in like this. Bolivia's a really beautiful country. There's a lot to see here, a lot of good people, rich culture, excellent food. Have you ever been before?"

"No, I've never left the States," Snake said.

"It's sort of comforting seeing another American, to be honest. There's a lot of multiculturalism in Bolivia, but aside from the goddamn tourists, not many from the States. Now, Brazil? There's plenty of Americans out there. You should come back."

"Maybe I will, once this business is done."

"I imagine she's been here before. She seems..."

"At ease with the place?" Snake nodded. "Seems that way."

"I was going to say preoccupied, sometimes."

"Maybe."

"Are you two...?" Ellie said.

"Huh?" Snake took his eyes from the rifle and looked to Ellie. Once the understanding brushed across his face, he smirked, shook his head, and went back to work. "No. We're not."

"I see, then. If you two aren't together, do you think she's a-"

"With that body? Not a chance."

Lara bit her lip, smiling.

"Do you guys base yourselves out of a town, or just that outpost?" Snake said.

"We check in with the ICRA every six months for a nice hotel and some dry clothes," Ellie said, "but most of the time, we're out here for a long time. Frankly it's a little hard relating to the other women, so it can be nice to get to be around other relief workers. There's more of a western vibe to them. It's a nice change of pace."

"Sure. How many relief workers are there in the area? Just you two?" Snake had finished one assault rifle and moved onto one of the pistols they'd brought back, which was shorter work and fewer parts.

"Yeah, it's pretty much us. There's another British guy who helps run the outpost, which is really half clinic and half import shop, but he's not with us, he's just a migrant worker."

"Have the Boys of El Che been working out here long? You treat any of them?"

At this, Vines seemed to be remarkably grim, but Ellie paid no mind. "Yes and no, in that order. The Boys seem to cause a lot of noise, but we've never really encountered any of them. It's strange."

Snake seemed only to growl.

There was a brief pause as Vines averted Ellie's attention as they refilled her canteen with his, then: "Are you really just her hired gun?" Ellie jerked a thumb over her shoulder to Lara. For her part, Lara ignored the comment, as if she hadn't heard. The distance between them would help the illusion.

"Hired gun? I think she holds hers fine, actually. I'm only here to help make sure everybody makes it out in one piece." He glanced at his surroundings. "Hell, I'm not even sure why we're here. Photography or artifacts or something. Too much for my small mind, anyway." And at this, even Vines seemed amused. Maybe more than Ellie.

"She's got quite the reputation, you know."

"That right."

"Fuck yes. Survived things no one else could have. Orphaned twice, if you can imagine it."

Snake locked a slide into a frame, stared down the sights. "I can't."

"Yeah, it's crazy. Shipwreck, planewreck, cave-ins, everything. You'd think she went looking for death. You ever wonder about-"

"I don't."

"Yeah, I suppose not." Ellie cast a glance at Lara, brushing a blonde strand out of her face. "She's not as bloodthirsty as I would have judged, from the tabloids."

"I try not to think about how to judge other people." Snake spoke this in a flat deadpan between casual examinations of metal and steel coils, and Lara wondered how Ellie would take it. Her silence seemed like enough of an answer, and Lara felt a small pride grow warmer.

"So how are you guys planning to get back?" Ellie said, after the moment had passed.

"Well, our plane's shot to hell, figuratively or literally, so I'm not sure. Is there a way inland from here? To civilisation?"

"Yeah, there's a bus that comes-"

Snake just started laughing. Ellie looked confused.

Arrangements after that were brief in their proceedings. Lara finished nailing stakes into the ground, the tent like an angular Quonset hut with a single dwarf door buttoned closed. She thought it would be novel to sleep in a bed again. The others wrapped up their tasks in short order, Snake first and Vines and Ellie last. While the ICRA members kept their own quick council, they did likewise, agreeing (however reluctant on Snake's part) that Vines would need a pistol.

It was then that Snake attempted to arm Otacon.

He held out a pistol and two clips of ammunition, safety-on and unloaded. Lara didn't need to predict where the conversation was headed.

"In case you need to. Alright?" Snake said, hand outstretched with the pistol in one palm.

"No. I can't, I won't. There's got to be a better way."

"And I'm telling you there might not be. If you need to defend yourself, then it'll come down to who has a gun and who doesn't."

"Yeah? Does that theory work with missiles, too? With nukes?"

"Goddamn it, that's not what I'm saying-"

"Snake, please, I can't shoot someone, I can barely see clearly if the air's humid-"

"Lara, help me out, would you?"

She sighed.

"Hal," she began. "If you don't want to, you shouldn't."

"Thank you," Otacon said.

"Are you both out of your damn minds?" Snake had to correct himself. His volume was raising higher than he was intending. "If those people come back-"

"As a woman who uses two pistols on a basis more frequent than she'd like, I trust you, I most certainly am not. If those sort come back they're going to find me in a very unsavoury mood. Aren't we here to extend a sort of peace-by-proxy?"

Snake sighed. Seemed to think this over. "Fine, yeah." He still held it to Otacon. "Then don't use it. Just... keep it. Alright? Just give it to whats-his-face and then you can grab it if you change your mind."

Otacon shook his head. "Alright, alright. Jeez." Then, when Snake turned to leave: "Hey. Thanks. For..." He held the gun, looking uncomfortable, and shrugged. "You know?"

"Yeah," Snake said. "I know." Then, as he walked away, he mumbled "Goddamn it. Had to take his side."

Before Snake could get far, Lara trotted behind him. "Hey."

"Yeah?"

"If something happens, I'll make sure he's alright. He seems to be better now." Lara said.

"I noticed. And thanks." Snake jerked his chin at the direction of the others. "You think you can trust him?"

"Vines? Well, I'm not terribly convinced we have a choice, but for what it's worth, I believe he'll be more than suitable. It's not as if he exactly hid he used to be former military, nor did he take up arms during the firefight. And anyway, if we end up in another shootout, a third gun would make a big difference, but I know you should get going."

"Yeah. I'll try not to be long. Used to hike in the forest. This shouldn't be that much different."

"Typical tourist."

"Funny." Then, as he turned to go: "Be on your toes, okay?"

"You too. Hurry back, I'm starting to like the smell of burning tobacco."

Snake's footfalls on the grassy forest floor, trampling underfoot with an odd mixture of disregard and deliberate care for his surroundings, reminded her again of his namesake, or rather the animalistic nature of the codenames she had read about. She recalled one of them, Octopus, as being particularly apt, but not to the extent that Snake could move in clear view of her yet otherwise make no meaningful disturbance of the world around him. She watched him yet did not hear him, nor feel him, the way she felt the others behind her betwixt a sixth sense and a mental umbillicus. It was the first point she'd noticed that if there was an on-switch to whatever abilities he'd possessed, they most certainly were being put to use.

Lara found herself drifting through her own thoughts of it. Of the nature of codenames, of him, and of that world. She briefly even recalled that strange and distant opposition by the code of Ocelot, and thought it as silly as it was formidable. Not unlike Snake.

Ellie and Snake had their things ready to go, Snake strapped with an assault carbine around his chest, clip loaded, safety off. He'd stocked himself with ammunition and returned Lara's pistol to her, for which she was very grateful. Another replacement for Snake sat in a hip holster, a 1911 standard. Ellie's pack was thick with supplies, canvass bloated with lumpy shapes.

"He won't be gone more than a few hours, presuming he doesn't get lost," Ellie said. Snake looked at her, mouth turned downward somewhere in the neighborhood of disdain. "Malcolm, you gonna be okay out here? Any idea when you're on your way in? There's the supply plane coming in Tuesday I could use your hand with."

"I imagine I'll suffer through it," Vines said. "I'll be back before then, no doubt."

"Lara, you got what you need?" Snake had a cigarette planted in one corner of his mouth, hands resting on the rifle.

"I have two strapping young men for company," she said. "And if that's not enough-" Lara patted the dual holsters on either hip. "If we need you, we'll yell really loud. Promise."

"If the radios hadn't been trashed, you wouldn't have to," Snake murmured. He shook his head. "No point worrying about it now. Back soon."

Lara felt a maddening urge to hug him. It wasn't their situation or even the vague disquieting affection for him that restrained her: Snake did not look like a man who enjoyed the goodbye hug.

Instead, she watched him go in silence.

The interlude was longer than Lara cared for. She did not care waiting for the sky to well up and dowse them in more rain, but the rain would come if they waited for it or not. For the time being, with the light fading in mid-day, they sat about in a small circle, busying themselves with other points of interest. Otacon was burying himself in between tapping on the wearable, fingers dancing around their opposite forearm, touch-screen tablet laid at an angle to act as a monitor. Vines contented himself with rolling cigarettes in advance from a pouch of tobacco and a sheaf of papers. Lara was going over another screen Otacon had given her to examine a topographical map of the area. She was doing her best to commit it to memory and finding it next to impossible; topography photos were the worst.

"So," Vines said. "why are you here?"

"Because." Otacon said. He clearly did not appreciate Vines rather dispirited interrogation technique.

Vines licked a strip of adhesive gum. "We're not in primary, _Hal_. Really. I am on the payroll, aren't I? Shouldn't I get to find out?"

Lara sighed. "Please, let's not do this again. Good lord, you're worse than S-"

Vines stared at her.

"Worse than somebody I know."

"You were going to say Saladdin."

Lara let out a laugh so involuntarily that she felt its distinctly quavery sound wildly unpleasant. "I most certainly was not. But yes, you are worse than him. At least he has some tact." She bit her lip. "We're here to stop something in the area. That's all. If anybody's on anybody's payroll, you're on theirs. Not mind. So I'd appreciate if you showed my friends some respect, yes?"

"I will show respect when I feel its damn well returned. You've been stringing the both of us along, and I agreed regardless to come on your little errand, so I think a few questions aren't exactly breaching ethics, alright?" A hiss of air came from either of his nostrils, and he shut his eyes. "Please. I want to help if I can, really, because I can't imagine you're a lot of savages. Especially not you, Miss High Society."

"Excuse you."

"Right. But if you want my help, I need to know what I'm doing."

Otacon and Lara exchanged looks, and she realised she was getting much better at talking without talking.

Lara stood. She went to the cache of materials and supplies they'd organized closer to the tents, and when she returned she gave to Vines an assault carbine and two clips of ammunition.

"We trust you." Then, following this. "We have to."

Vines looked at the gun, at her, then back at the gun. He did nothing for a long while. Then he picked it from her hand, barrel-first, and examined its ejection port, clip, and so forth.

"Thank you," Vines said. He was examining the currency she'd provided him, and the thought made her ill-at-ease. "So you're here to help The Boys?"

Otacon gaped at him. "Help...?! No! We're here to stop them!"

"Wait, you mean...? I don't get it. You're here with a bunch of guns and that man, I just thought..."

"No, absolutely not," Otacon said.

"Gents, we're going in circles," Lara said. "Mister Vines, do you really want to know?"

Vines thought for a long time. "Yes, I believe I do."

Otacon picked up the thread of conversation. "We have reason to believe that Bolivia is housing a new type of weapon. Something that's never seen mass production before, but it's been around for a long time. The Boys of El Che are developing it, or helping someone who is. We're here to put an end to all that. We were planning on this being a lot quieter before we were shot down."

"So you are with the government?" Vines said.

Lara: "Bolivia's?"

Vines: "No, the States."

Otacon: "No to both anyway. We're just... activists, I guess. We're not entirely sure why we're here except that thing can't see the light of day."

"Activists? There has to be more to it than that. Why you three? Is there even anyone else?"

"We're just a group of people who have some experience with it," Otacon said. "Well, except for Lara."

Vines looked to her. "Then why are you here?"

"Because I thought it sounded like an interesting way to spend a vacation." She smiled at him and tried to hold her patience.

"And Saladdin? Why is he here?"

"Why do you keep calling him that?

Vines hesitated, looking out into the jungle. The vegetation was a brilliance of engineering, and she understood the desire to peer at its architecture for some sort of guidance, so she simply let him work it out on his own. "I used to be in the Australian Defense Force. In the early aughts, I mean. I was nineteen. I was stationed out of an allied base during a joint operation with a bunch of Americans, some Canadians. Out there, among the kurds and the rebels and the rest, there's rumours of a man like him, his body riddled with scars."

"Like him? What do you mean?"

"A man with a gun who goes from country to country, helping set up revolutionaries, fan the flames of whatever war is nearby. It's why I thought you were with The Boys." He sighed. "A lot of the people we help are people who're hurt by them. Farmers who don't want to side with their cause, or won't provide shelter, resources. People who're injured in whatever operation they have going on out in the jungle. And they've been growing. Over the past year, their numbers seem to have tripled. How they're doing anything out here is beyond me, but all we're doing is keeping the status quo. _Their _status quo."

"I can't imagine what that's like," Otacon said.

"I can tell you," Vines said. "Imagine cleaning up broken glass with your hands, and as soon as the floor's clear, someone throws a brick through another window." Vines pulled a cigarette from the thirty-odd pile he'd created, and lit it, inhaling luxuriantly. It seemed much more a rite with Vines than Snake's habit, almost reverent. His movements were languid, his eyes florid. "What else did you want to know?"

"You seem to be conviced of this man. Why him? Why... Plissken?"

"Because I've seen him."

"In person?"

"No, in photos, and in stories. People talk. Villages tell the same stories they've told for hundreds of years, so stories only a few decades old are pretty recent news as far as campfire anecdotes go. The kurds are especially taken with him." Vines sighed out a length of ethereal cancer. "You know, it's strange. When I was there, they talked about him in the present tense. Like he never left. If I hadn't seen a photograph, I'd have sworn they were just legends. There's a lot of that sort of business out there, and when you don't have books or television, you're fairly willing to entertain any sort of fancy to keep it together. It wasn't that big of a jump to figure a man like that would incite, or side with, people like the Boys, similarities to Guevara not withstanding."

Lara thought of Snake having infiltrated Iraq and said nothing.

"You called him Saladdin." Otacon said. "Why?"

Vines shrugged. "It's what they called him. Are either of you familiar?"

Lara nodded, and said she'd explain to Otacon later, but Vines said there was no need.

"Saladdin was a great man. A conqueror, maybe, but a great man. He gave each person under his rule a fair hand, especially his prisoners. Fine damn lodgings, offered succor, food, prayer mats, everything except a hi-def flatscreen. If he took a land, he treated them well. Everything was in purpose of the greater good, but he never compromised his faith. To be called that seems like a fairly high honour."

"You sound like you admire him," Lara said.

"Don't confuse respect with admiration. A killer is a killer is a killer."

They said nothing.

Again, Lara thought of Snake.

"Is that why you left the military?" Otacon asked.

"Absolutely. It wasn't for me. I thought maybe I was being presumptuous, but... There's not a heaps of room for critical thought in it, right? First chance I got, went to Uni, ended up with the ICRA. Married a girl in the States, never looked back."

"You said you'd seen photos?" Otacon said.

"Sure. Shit, they're not exactly common, and the ones I did see are blurry, but they're out there. As keepsakes. I didn't take any with me, it's against the hadiths."

"The hadiths?" Lara said. "You mean you're religious?"

"A reformer, to a certain extent, but sure." He shrugged. "I haven't done the morning prayer in a long time, but I've got the fanclub badge and everything. God exists. It'd be naiive to think otherwise. That was another reason to leave the nasho. Muslims aren't liked anymore there than in the States. White or otherwise." Vines plucked the cherry of his cigarette from its lit end and flicked it away, stashing its remainder with the others. " Anyway, it's why I started calling him that. Plissken, I mean."

"I don't follow," Lara said.

"Because he looks just like him. Plissken, the man in the photos. They look exactly the same, save some scars and-"

_"You mean-"_

"What? Did I say something?" Vines look to the both of them. Lara looked pale. Otacon had his head downcast.

"It'd take more effort to explain it," Otacon removed his glasses, planted the ridge of his nose in between his middle and index fingers. "Trust me, it's not him. And if I were you, I would try to avoid the topic."

"Then who is he? Plissken?"

"Solid Snake. My name's Emmerich, not Danziger."

Vines looked to Lara. "So when you were going to say I sounded worse than-"

"Worse than Snake, yes. Not Saladdin." By this point, Lara was simply playing with the touchscreen, not studying it. She couldn't focus on it.

In Nastasha's account, Lara had recalled reading so much of it about Liquid, Snake's brother, and his obsession with their "father" Big Boss. How he'd said Big Boss had left his mark around the world. Lara did not care for the echoes of history to talk back to her, and someone else's history at that.

She thought of her mother, and suddenly wanted Snake very near by.

"So, wait," Otacon said. "If you thought we were here with the Boys, then why did you ally yourself with us? "

"Because I thought..." Vines blew air out of either of his cheeks in a long exhalation. He looked sheepish, less like the angry twenty-something he'd been projecting thus far. If anything, he looked closer to Otacon. "I thought maybe I could stop you. If Americans and British were getting involved, I thought maybe Bolivia was going to get a lot hotter."

"It is, if we can't stop it," Lara said. "The Boys are planning to use this superweapon to try and unite all of South America into one country."

Vines laughed. "That's impossible."

"It's really not. If they can get it operational, and capable, they can take the rest of the continent if they can organise the manpower," Otacon said.

"If this... _thing_ is that powerful, that would mean it would have to be..."

Horror crossed Vines face like the plague.

"Yes," Lara said. "It's nuclear."


	26. PART ONE: CHAPTER 21

_Author's: Sorry We were late. No excuses; just too busy. More tomorrow, and hopefully Thursday & Friday Thanks._

* * *

It was Otacon who heard the first hoofbeats like drums rumbling the ground.

He came back into camp calmly, intelligently, and collectedly. He had been off looking for any salvage that might have interfered with nearby flora or fauna. So when, as Lara smiled a greeting at him and he went immediately to her side and began whispering in her ear, the cold that came over her was less a construct of training and experience, a dim arctic fever before and during a fight, than a result of being taken completely by surprise.

Their earlier talk had tapered with little fanfare; Vines, at least, seemed to be on their level and for that Lara and Otacon both felt collectively better for it. The .45 Otacon had been given laid with Vines, given a spare holster from the plane, and he was less intent on being sure Otacon was armed than Snake had been. As to what Vines could offer, they hadn't discussed it, but he held the rifle well enough to remind her of what would be required.

It was then unfortunate, she thought, that they would require his ability so soon.

"There are a bunch of people on horses."

She did her best to keep her face blank.

"I don't know how long they've been here. I didn't even hear them, I felt them."

She nodded agreement, raising one eyebrow and faked amusement. She sat down. Otacon followed suit.

Lara looked to Vines, hoping to catch his eyes. Maybe they could play offensively, getting into position before the attack hit and put their aggressors on the defense-

It didn't matter.

In the valley, maybe only a few short miles off, a single pistol shot blew out.

Vines head snapped to its direction. "What the hell was that?"

"Vines." This time, she did catch his sightline.

She slipped one pistol out of her holster, then the other, and his eyes trailed her thumbs as they flicked off the safety.

His nod was almost imperceptible.

They were surrounded on every side save one by trees, and the last was a small rockwall that could easily be vaulted over. There was nothing to hide behind.

Before the world collapsed into a rhythm of bellowing fire, she had only time to realise what the shot in the distance had meant, and between whom the gunfire was being exchanged.

Otacon opened his mouth to speak. She thought she heard, "Vines, can I have-"

In the brush, a woman whispered.

The veridian behind him moved, leaves and shrubs shifting. Lara pulled leather and fired, dual USPs swallowing sound and eating the air itself, a ghost of flame snapped from either barrel and anything aural being swallowed by the staccato hatred of their return fire.

In the periphery of her hearing, horses neighed and stamped and cried out in protest.

Suddenly at her side, Vines opened up with the assault rifle. The rate of fire was easily three, four times the speed of her ability to pull the trigger on the pistols.

A wall had been erected between her senses and her understanding of them. The sound of Vine's rifle might have likewise been multiplied, but she was not hearing sound but feeling its vibration. Lara saw her sight behind her eyes. Every moment was just a series of still images fluttering by without pause.

She became likewise acutely aware of her body, in a way that she hadn't been before. The stance she'd taken, on one bent knee, arms akimbo with a pistol in either, but those were surface ideas. She felt the ground beneath her knee, the moisture seeping into the cloth, the verdancy of its nutrient-rich soil. Vines was close enough to her that, while he fired in bursts, her arms were in near enough proximity that the gasses from the rifle's ejection port were heating her wrists.

Everything was shimmering through the a haze of superunderstanding. Every action was reflex and each moment was only water through a sluiceway of muscle tissue and adrenaline. Thought did not exist.

It felt good. No, it felt great. And that scared her.

Vines nudged her with one cocked elbow, still aiming aside her right flank, and paused only long enough to be heard. "Reload and get your man!"

Lara had counted how many rounds she'd used, and she spat a few more rounds into the direction of their attacks. They had gotten lucky and were not surrounded, but with no cover, offense was the only option, and one that would siphon their resources in only minutes.

Lara fired her last round while stepping carefully, slowly, backwards, and once she was dry she took to one knee to Otacon's left. "We've got to get out of here!" She shouted, certainly she had only been half heard, one pistol's well emptied of its clip and the other holstered during the reload.

A volley of gunfire cut off Otacon's first attempt to question, but the second made it through. "Where?!"

"Snake and Ellie! It's our best shot!" One pistol reloaded and she began work on the second. "Stay behind us!"

Vines was retreating the same manner she had, firing while backing up cautiously, and she traded him spots. They'd had no chance to engage a trade-off for Vines to reload; Lara heard before seeing. A triplicate of horses, and their armed riders, coalesced out of the underbrush.

The beat of hooves ran vibrations up her legs, their gait a persistent, dull drumming at her eardrums. The three riders circled them, with Lara, Vines, and Otacon back to back, having taken to standing in abandonment of their broken frontline.

"Lara."

She looked to Otacon.

"Don't. It's over." He placed one hand on the inside of her elbow, gently pushing for her to lower her twin pistols.

"You're out of your mind if you think-"

"I am afraid very much that the American is correct." A fourth horse emerged from between a gap of trees, moving to the centre of their line of sight. In its saddle sat a woman of forty, thin as a lathe, dark as a nut. She was clothed in loose-fitting camouflage fatigues not unlike Lara's, but with only a tanktop around her midsection, and on top of that was strapped a hunting rifle. Her hair was closecropped, and on her head a perch of auburn crown.

There was also a very obvious burn, veiny with discolouration, running up from her shirt's collar, wrapping itself around her throat like a noose.

"Please, lower your weapons. This isn't about you." Her voice was warm, with a trace of an accent, and brilliantly calm. She might have been quietly ordering another glass of wine. She might have been commanding an execution. There was no inflection save patience; regard; suffering. But no sadness. "I did not expect you see you. Maybe the American military, but not you. You're that Englishwoman, correct? The adventuress?"

Lara stared at the woman. She said nothing.

"My name is Merlose. You seem hardly in need of an introduction, I expect." She looked to Vines. "I was not expecting to find you taking up arms. How would your organisation look at you now?"

Vines followed Lara's example in silence.

"You know this is not a fight either of you can win. Especially not with him." The woman gestured at Otacon. "I would ask why you are here, but if Doctor Emmerich is with you, I believe I have an idea."

"Emmerich?" Vines glanced in his periphery to Lara, and she jerked her head away, as if his scrutiny were an insect bite.

"Merlose, is it? Well, I don't care to chat. Let us alone. Take your horses, and your killers, and crawl back to hell." Lara spoke through gritted teeth. The boiling blood coursing throughout became like sludge. She felt oddly laconic, and what Snake would have called combat high was rapidly crashing to its bottom point. It was queer. She'd never felt it die off so suddenly, and with such adverse effects.

Maybe this is what real defeat feels like, Lara thought. She then pushed this out of her head.

"You are not in a position to bargain, so please, no wasting time." Merlose closed the space between them, placing her ride between herself and the others. The horse was close enough Lara could smell the stable it'd been kept in. The sawdust, powder, and oats, her own sweat. Merlose dismounted, placing her body within inches of the double barrels trained on her. Vines had long since let his rifle drop.

Her hands were at her sides. She stared Lara in her eyes, and in the glare of light filtered through cordate chloro-filtres, the mist that drifted about them was as dreamlike lime breath. "Let us take Emmerich. I guarantee that he is much more important to us than to you. If he designed this, he can fix it."

"I'm not fixing anything for you people." Otacon took a step toward Merlose and attempted to say something else. What it would have been remained unknown: it never got that far.

Lara never saw Merlose's arm shift from her side until Otacon was sent sprawling, spinning in his descent to the forest floor, face skidding along the soil and the pebbles before the rest of his body followed in the crash. In the impact, she heard his glasses shatter.

When Merlose turned back to Lara, she already had a hand around her throat, flying across the small space and parting between the horses. Her grip was a vice wrapped around Merlose's windpipe, pinning her to a tree, one pistol left abandoned in the process.

Gunmetal clicked all around her. Each barrel was a yawning mouth waiting to eat her alive.

"I swear to God if you touch Hal Emmerich like that again, _I will break you in half.__"_

Merlose waved one hand away at her confederates, and they dropped their stances, guns at the ready but not trained on them.

When Lara understood what was happening, she'd joined Otacon on the ground.

Her chest burned. The guns were gone.

From her periphery, Vines was being yanked to his feet, one eyes already swelling with a blow Lara had neither seen nor heard.

It was only later that Lara was able to reconstruct it. She had taken a heel to her chest and felt the air filling her lungs evaporate into fire, the veins in her neck threatening to burst with the sudden force of the blow. When that hadn't been enough, she'd taken another blow to the side of her mouth enough that it loosened a bicuspid's residence in her gumline.

Her vision had gone into a blur of fluid colour that was spotted by white pinpricks that shifted like fireflies. When it cleared, she turned her head, gathering herself on her hands and knees, to look at Merlose. She looked down at Lara dispassionately, and said nothing.

Merlose's radio, mounted at her high hips, spit and hissed. She picked it up, held down a button on its side. Lara had barely enough wherewithal to translate the Portuguese. "Keep this short, please."

The other side spoke also in Portuguese. "We have eliminated their second party."

"Alright," Merlose said. "Thank you." She replaced the radio to her side.

In the brief duration of the call, Merlose and Lara's eyes never left each other.

"How did you know he was here? That he designed it?" Lara

Merlose smiled at her. It was like watching tombstones form to make mimeography. Lara thought it was hideous in its ivory satisfaction.

"Whose name," Merlose said, "did you think was on the blueprints?"

Lara stared as much into the barrel of Merlose's bolt-action rifle as she did into the twin marbles planted deep in Merlose's skull.

"Stop."

Otacon was getting to his feet. "I'll go. Just stop. " When he spoke, Lara could see the red tinge lining his mouth like moribund crimson syrup. "No more killing. We didn't come here for anyone to die."

"Hal," Lara whispered.

It didn't matter. Merlose took hold of Otacon's arm, picking up his glasses before doing so and giving them to him, and then mounted her horse.

Lara pushed every bit of humiliation and anger and combative fury into her legs and found them cowardly. Her spirit and her flesh held fast their divergent desires.

Without another word to anyone else, and with Otacon riding with tied wrists behind his female captive, they road away.


	27. PART ONE: CHAPTER 22

Lara awoke with Vines shaking her by either shoulder. It took a significant form of willpower not to club him in the mouth out of instinct.

"How long have I-"

"An hour, hour and a half, give or take? I'm not sure, my watch is broken. Yours too."

She looked at her wrist. A huge knot was swelling up around either side of the band, and the quartz face had been shattered, sending thin slivers of glass on either side of her skin. She brush off the glass and the crusted blood.

Lara glanced to Vines's wrist, and found the same knot, the same cuts. It would have been easy to snap a rifle butt along their hand while they lay unconscious.

"They want us disoriented. Awfully damn thorough, I will say," Lara said.

Rainclouds had already mottled the sky's dim blue tint into a vague misshapen blot, clusters of clouds visible only beyond the waves of thin rain and endlessly tall canopy. She was soaked to the bone, clothes clinging to every contour and feeling vividly, miserably cold in the process. The cool air that drifted between the wooden obelisks that surrounded them was a vicious insult to what had already been significant injury. Rainfall was tumbling off the tips of heart-shaped appendages providing them with the barest glimpse of shelter, so dense was the roof of vegetation about their heads, but the multitude of veined runnel waterways draining down and forming more thick streams from their points of origin made it almost impossible to talk without swallowing water.

"Dumb creatures think if they break our watches," Vines said, "we can't find them?"

Lara found her footing, however shaky it may have been. "I imagine it's a bit less transparent, or simple, as that." She looked about, surprised by how close the feeling of being hungover was to her current state. "I don't understand. Why didn't they just kill us?"

"Hm?" Vines paused, looked bitter, and looked back at her. "Of all the things you could complain about-"

"They had to have a reason," Lara said, "or we'd be dead."

She stopped, feeling the last syllable taper out of her mouth without thought to the surrounding rationale.

"We need a plan."

"I'm all ears," Vines said.

She looked about. Their supplies had been upended in the marshy body of water that their plane laid in like carrion, the waterfront dotted with crates and small parcels. Their backpacks had been tossed in, likewise. Neither of them were armed any longer.

When Lara tried to bend down and examine one of the broken packages that had once been a form of ration, her ribs expanded fresh misery to her chest. Everything in the region hurt. Her breasts, her spine, shoulderblades. She wondered, between fits of groaning and with Vines at her side, whether or not she had ever been kicked that hard before. Still, once the initial pain had subsided, she forced it on herself again to picked up the food.

"You going to be okay? Need anything?" Vines, from a cursory observation, had his own problems. His watch had been more durable than his, and as such his wrist looked much worse than hers. The hand it was attached to lay limp and discoloured. A fracture was likely. His face was scratched all along one cheek, the impression of pebbles and dirty soil still clinging to some points of his flesh and in his hair.

"A warm bath and dry clothes would be nice, but until then I'll have to be. You should wash your face off, make sure to do what you can for the cuts. They left us our canteens at least."

As Vines followed her advice, Lara began casting about the ground for a trail, and found it unsurprisingly difficult to follow. If she hadn't known to look for hoofprints, they wouldn't had stood out. They'd been riding over gravel, stepping on the roots of trees, essentially anything that would hesitate to leave a trail behind. It obfuscated the trail but not completely.

What caused its disappearance was how the trail led very clearly directly into the marshes.

"I don't understand, how can they manage this? A horse is over a thousand pounds, empirical, right? Wouldn't it be extraordinarily dangerous to lead an equine into water like that?"

"It is," Vines said, standing upright from having lightly hosed off his hair. "But they're used to the terrain, and horses are phenomenal swimmers. I'm sure they know which marshes and lakes are free of aquatic predators and which aren't."

"I suppose so. Anyway, this can wait. I want us to get after Hal as soon as we can. You and Sn-"

She stopped.

_Snake._

The gunfire in the distance, before they'd been ambushed.

The radio Merlose had received in Portuguese.

"Shit," she said.

Lara looked about rapidly for anything she might need. "We've got to find Snake and Ellie."

Vines went to the waterline snatched at the satchel of things, and anything that might have been left from its discard, and jammed them still dripping into his backpack, then threw the useless harness that had once held his assault rifle into the river as an exchange. "Snake seemed like a strong man, and Ellie's smart. I know the way they would have taken. Ellie and I charted it out so that Snake could have the map on the trip back."

"Good, that's a place to start." Vines handed her the map, and Lara took a minute or two to study it intently. It was topographical, but she memorised points she would recognise intrinsically, like valleys, or large swatches of elevated terrain, or rivers that had shaped scar through the elevation levels of the earth. She took to one knee after she was done, reaffirming her bootlaces. "Think you can keep up? I won't be able to slow for you."

"I'll do what I can. If this is a trap-"

"It isn't. No point, they could've knocked us off the playing field earlier."

"-still, you need to be careful. We're not so much as armed. We've got to play this damned close, alright? You're going to need some type of weapon if we were to take anybody or anything on."

"No," she said, feeling an anger simmer in the burning muscle between her ribs. "I won't."

"It's going to be uphill, mostly. Watch out for-"

"Yes, yes, are you ready to go."

Vines looked at her, mouth buttoned in a skeptical downwards tilt, eyes determined but still wary of her. " Lara. They could have killed us, we were way too outnumbered. You really think they're still-"

"Yes," she lied.

* * *

When they arrived at the cliffside, Lara's eyes blurred from the sight of the bodies.

The trees had slowly given way to a rocky escarpment dividing a thick valley, with the rockwall alternating with its face covered in wind-gnarled branches and vines jutting out in search of life, and the brilliant clay-and-soil colours co mingling in a marbled shade of swirled orange-pink with deep auburn closer to treebases. The cliff's edge had allowed the trees to recede in a jaggedly orderly fashion, with grass and mossy stones close enough to the lip they were constantly ebbing from gentle breeze over the edge and dropping into the river below, soundlessly save for their whispering tumbling.

The run had taken an oblong hour, with Lara less leading and more exhausting of Vines, and his ragged breath slowly receded until she had completely lost the sound of him behind her, following in the desperate wake of their decidedly expedited rendezvous. The Jeep came and went, looking blasted out and gutted by the fall, foliage buried into the intestines of its capsized undercarriage. It lay dead on one side, with only sign of Snake and Ellie's pilgrimage a discarded hairband and a single cigarette butt jammed into what would have been the hubcap. Lara waited almost ten minutes, an agonising exhibition in patience, for Vines to catch up, and once he had, she'd taken off again, calmling somewhat and allowing him to keep pace. Their progress was swift enough they might have traversed the same space as Snake and Ellie in half the time; Lara thought ruefully she could have done it in forty five minutes had she not waited for Vines.

Soon, the types of plants began a gentle chance demarcating what could have been an entirely different ecosystem. As they had approached, Lara's deepening sense of dread threatened an upgrade to panic as she began to find ragged footfalls, a lost tennis shoe, and the leavings of automatic rifle fire. The air had held close the cordite's scent in it humid breath and gave the impression of exhalation only once they'd disturbed the air where it had taken place, ever ascending up what became an increasingly difficult slope. Splatterings of rifle shells, cast off and oily, littered the ground, and Lara stopped when she came to the first body.

The corpse was garbed in almost the same gear and outfit as their attackers, and his rifle lay slack around his body. Lara picked it off him with some inner disgust drowned out by a deepening apprehension of what else they would find.

Behind her, Vines sprinted upward. His rapid hitching intake of oxygen reminded her of the agony she'd been fighting through during the majority of their run.

Vines spoke under his breath. "No," he said, "they couldn't have."

"Vines," Lara said. She knew what was coming. His face was contorting, his mouth learning a horror. "Don't, we don't know who's still-"

It was too late, and Vines was already shouting. "Ellie! Ellie, it's Malcolm!" Vines breath came out hoarse and agonised, "Ellie, we're here, come on! Stop being daft!"

Lara knew there was no point in trying to stop him, and continued making her way up the awful proceeds. Another body paired with a female soldier, both dead from gunshot wounds at the base of a tree, guns in-hand. She took a pistol from one of their side holsters, crossed herself for the second time, and placed it in her own. They were reaching the cliff's edge, and she could see beyond cyclopean fronds the crisscrossing lines of metal wirework that allowed passage, however dangerous, beyond the gorge.

They proceeded, and the pickings became increasingly violent and distinctly more aggressive. A body, two, four. Another set of three, with stab wounds. Exit wounds in the back, in the chest, in heads and in limbs. One man looked as though he had fallen on a grenade.

Lara looked at the patterns in shells, in bodies, in bootprints. It was a skillset she'd used countless times before but for precisely more academic purposes. This made her feel ill in its detective proximity.

When she came to a behemoth of a tree, its enormous girth towering up and its brances extending over the cliff's edge, she was reminded of how bonsai trees are made to look as real as their inspiration. In its life, she saw the vastness of that inspiration, and was certain its webwork of roots were keeping the soil together beneath their feet rather than a barren form of earth that let out nothing beneath them save for arid, collapsing soil. It was a sort of Alpha amongst so many other points of beauty, and it provided a distraction inside her.

She also saw all of the wounds it had endured for the man who had taken shelter behind it.

The part of the tree facing the forest was ruined by blasts big and small. Gunfire had blown out such massive amounts of its trunk it could only be described as having hemorrhaged splinters. It was riddled with these wounds, and as she neared it to examine the bulk of such damage, she spotted the glimmering pile of handgun and rifle shells that surrounded the vast roots at its base, and the empty rifle that sat amongst them, left like carcass amongst carcass.

From the first to the cairn of shells she found at its base, there were maybe fifteen bodies in all. The story told was clear enough. Lara needed no close examination to see the narrative presented.

It was the largest tree closest to the edge, and beyond the tree a year was only the dimming thickness of grass and one bleeding, final body without so much as a weed sprouted anywhere close to him. His face was inches from the edge.

The bandanna was fluttering and his body splayed, head limp to one side.


	28. What the hell

So for the past week this hasn't been updated and I don't know why, considering I've been working on it regularly.

The only thing I can presume is that this is human error on my part and although I have added the documents, I have not updated it proper. That has been corrected.

Updates (that is, chapters 20, 21, and 22) have all been added.

Thank you again for your patients in this severe misunderstanding. And my mispelling of patience.

~Jack Plain


	29. PART ONE: CHAPTER 23

Expect regular updates as of September.

I'm back. Thanks for waiting.

~Jack.

* * *

When Lara spotted his body, she stopped dead, staring, before screaming. "VINES! Get over here now!"

The two of them ran to Snake's side. The first thing she spotted was a knife, looking deranged, still jammed into one of his thighs. The next was the archipelago of bruises that had traipsed lumpy islets across his face, small knots beneath his skin where blows from rifle butts or iron knuckles might have struck him. In between those islets were undercurrents of purpling blood, blued and mauve from burst crimson vessels and thin scrapes connecting them with crusted scarlet fibres. One eye had swollen shut, and there was a tear along his bandanna that ran rich with his blood. Any other wounds were covered by his clothing, which, while now filthy and muddy from the scuffle, was still primarily about his body save for the points where knife swipes had made their signatures.

Vines had run to her side, and they took to one bent knee at either side of Snake at the same moment.

She reached out to touch him, looked at his wounds, and thought better of it. The feeling of withdrawing her hand was more difficult than she believed it would have been.

"What can we do?" Lara said. "Is he alright?"

"I'm not sure and no, in that order. " Vines gingerly appraised his body, feeling about him with the utmost care. The examination was thorough, routine, but not at all cavalier. He squeezed his muscles, his chest, his back and his limbs. He rifled through his hair. "Fuck."

"What? What is it?"

"He was beaten into unconsciousness." Vines lifted one hand, clad in fingerless gloves. "There's burst capillaries all along his knuckles. He was still at it when they brought him down. And in his hair, there's a bunch of small abrasions, some of them bleeding, most of them the size of a golfball."

She reached out her hand to his face. "God."

"Trust me, God doesn't have anything to do with this. If they were hitting him with their rifles this hard, this many times, they could have killed him." Vines gently shook him. "Have you any idea how hard it is to beat a man into unconsciousness?"

Lara looked at the somewhat misshapen features his face had taken on. She could imagine.

"There's no softness to his head, so if I had to guess, there's no fractures, but the closest MRI machine is twenty miles out from even village bus." He wiped his hands on his pants, and turned to her. "Lara. What do you want to do?" Vines said.

"Would it be safe to try and wake him?"

"There doesn't seem to be any back trauma, and he's definitely not comatose. I've got smelling salts in my pack, albeit a little wet. I'd prefer he were awake before I yank the knife."

"How come?"

"I don't think a major artery was hit, judging by just the colour of his face,-"

"He's not pale, right, right-"

"-but if it was, he could bleed to death right here, right now. I'm going to need some gauze after pulling this knife out, too. "

"Then let him rest for a moment. We'll need to know whatever he can tell us, amongst other things, but I don't want you two tied up if it turns out we're not alone."

"You really think there's someone else still here?"

"No, but I'd rather not prove myself wrong. Just a sec." Lara crouched, running a smooth hand along the ground, its hardpan soil packed tight as it neared the cliff's edge into an arid mass of reddish brown earth. If she were to hazard a guess, it was devoid of nutrients caused by the frequent foot traffic over years of persistent traversal to and from the ziplines that hung dangerously slack from their side of the river to beyond it.

She stood up, looking about the ground nearby, making an attempt to navigate the impossible lei lines their bootprints had created. They created loose geometrical hell in the dirt, barely present for the weight of their bodies having left almost nothing in the densely packed ground.

When she spotted them lead to U-shapes in the dust, then retreat into the forest, she turned back to Vines.

"I think we're clear. Wake him up."

In a moment, Vines had produced a small plastic container like an eyedropper, and squeezed it slightly just below Snake's nostril. In a moment, he jerked to consciousness, eyes wildly aware for just a moment before pain flooded into his senses stronger than the sensory alert he'd withstood. Then, in a grimace, he closed his eyes again, breathing normally but visibly pained.

Lara's lungs deflated. She hadn't noticed she'd been holding her breath.

Snake groaned, and Vines laughed, a sound jaggedly similar to a hyena.

She took to one knee at his side, put a hand on his chest.

"Snake, it's Lara. Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, yeah. Christ." One hand went to his head, and his body curled with the pain, like the whole of him were one muscle clenching in an effort to halve his aches. "My whole everything hurts."

"We can tell." Lara put a hand on his neck. "Vines, do you have any-"

"Sure." He produced a transparent baggy from his satchel, tied closed with hemp on one end. "Take two of these, and I'll give you some coca leaves to chew."

Vines put them in his hand, and Lara helped him sit up, hands around his torso, propping him up into her lap. She poured water into his mouth, and even as he swallowed, he grimaced in pain.

"I know you're probably not up to it, but what the hell happened?" Vines said. "And where's Ellie? We can't find her any-"

Snake moved with a speed neither of them expected, forcing Vines to jump back on his haunches and land on his back in the process, Lara knocked to one side. In a heartbeat, Snake was making an attempt to stand, face flashing agony when his body reminded him of the knife still in one leg.

"No!" Crashing to the ground, Snake pushed off again from on all fours, limping to the edge of the cliff, hands reaching for the tight coils of metal hung across the gorge. "Ellie, she's-"

Vines was staring at him, then at the cliff, then at Snake. "No."

Lara reached for Vines, but it didn't matter. He was already out of reach, taking to his boots and darting to the cliffside along with Snake. He shouted "ELLIE!"

By the time Lara took her stance abreast the two men, Vines had already turned away. As she crested the hill, she saw the body too.

"We were getting ready to cross the ravine," Snake said, "when they appeared. Two units, one on horseback. We were surrounded before we had a chance to react. I took out as many as I could, but they weren't..." Snake's head dipped to his chest.

"Taking prisoners, Snake?" Lara reached out to him. Snake shrugged off her touch angrily. She winced, and did not make a second attempt, her hand retreating to rub the back of her neck.

"Ellie fought off a few of them. Pulled the pin on one of their grenades, no less. Eventually, though, it didn't matter."

Lara looked close at the small, broken form in the distance. Regardless of the distance, she could see the body's green shirt dark with blood, tattered. Ellie's body was facedown, and lay crumpled on a shelf along the furthest cliff face. Her limbs were tangled and bent in ways they did not belong.

"I was still fighting when she made for the wires, thinking maybe she could cross."

"Ellen," Vines said, almost a whisper.

From where Ellie had fallen, she had almost made the trip across. If Lara was right, she would have been within just a few metres.

The wind snapped at their hair, their clothes, yanking at the trees with miserable petulance. It was bitter and fragrantly cool, a mingling scent of moss and black mold driven from one of the frigid caves littering the waterline below.

When Vines turned to look at Snake, his jaw was set. His eyes were wide, and with what Lara could not tell. He did not look boyish, with or without the blonde hair that kicked around his brow. There was no quiver in his face, no tremble of the lips or threat of tears. Just a hardness she'd seen in Snake, in herself. She did not have to wonder how he felt.

For a moment, Lara waited for the blow to strike, a lance shot out from Vines' periphery. But when none did, and he simply hung his head, Lara tried tugging slightly on his pouch to get his attention.

"Vines?" No response. "Malcolm? Please, I know this must be hard, I probably know it more than you'd think, but we can't... well, we can't wait. We need to get Snake cared for, and get moving. There's still someone else who needs us."

Vines scoffed. "Who? You three? Leave it to a Brit and pair of Americans to be this narcissistic, you self-centered-"

Lara did not let her anger bleed through at his selfishness.

"No. The rest of Bolivia. The people the ICRA helps. Remember?"

"Maybe the rest of South America." Snake said. He was still looking over the cliffside after Vines sight had drifted away. "We've got to get down there, as soon as we can. Vines."

He turned to look once more at Snake's eyes. Lara found the view less pleasant than she remembered.

"Vines, if you're with us," Snake said, "We could use the help, but if not, we're going anyway. I'm not going to let these people walk into a city with whatever the hell they're building out here. I can't turn away from this sort of thing anymore." He looked to Lara. "Both of you. Please?"

While Lara and Snake sat back near the ruined mass of tree that the firefight had made refuse of, Vines stayed stock still.

As she was preparing the meager supplies she'd had in her pack, both Snake and Lara's attention turned to Vines, as he began vomiting and shaking, having to lean against the wire post for support. His breath came in ragged, awful retching hitches, then he vomited again, then he would struggle for air again until he was dry heaving.

Lara went to him with a canteen.

For a while they stood mute, in epitaph.

Then they went to work on Snake's body.

"Lay back." Vines took a moment to spit water off to the side, then take another mouthful. He poured some of the canteen's water on his hands. "Lara, hold him."

She did.

Snake looked at her apprehensively. "This is going to be bad, isn't it?"

Vines took a moment to disinfect his hands with small alcohol wipes, then began cutting into his pants a larger hole where the knife had entered his leg. Normally Lara might have mouthed off about seeing more of Snake's skin, but any mirth had been wrung out of her.

Vines took to removing the knife.

For a time, there was Snake's muted scream.

Somewhere in the cage between her ribs, where her muscles met her bone, there was a deep, vagrant ache like a wound. The sound of his pain was like fury, or hate, or decay. It was an infection that came in through her ears, searing out the sound of the frogs and the wind and the dull, pattering rain that came from no cloud at all, falling with thick taps on the verdant fingertips of trees.

She watched Snake's hand dig into the ground, fingertips burrowing into the earth, five anemic craters beneath his palm made from the shared pain between the two men.

When Snake's hand reached hers, she took it, and said nothing. Nothing of the calloused skin on his palm, or the burns, or the scars she saw run up his wrist like photographs of scampering insects that hated the flesh they'd scour for nourishment.

She looked briefly at Vines. His eyebrows angled together towards his nose, his upper lips pulled back in an unconscious dedication to the task at hand. She thought it half-hatred, half-habit. He looked as though he did not relish anything. He looked like he might enjoy the pain Snake was exhibiting.

Vines pressed his hand to Snake's thigh, the wound gaping and suddenly flush with red confluence. Lara was reminded sickly of cherry pie filling, the clot a miasma of tangled red cells.

Snake let out a howl. His eyes were wide, Lara gazing carefully at the canines beneath his lips, the sharp hints of biscupid agony.

Lara felt a pain that she could not have quantified. It would only be repeated twice more in her life.

"He's counting on us," Snake said, between ragged grasps for breath.

"Yes," she said, "He is."

She placed her palm at his forehead. He felt like someone had placed a furnace beneath the plate of skull encasing his mind.

Vines looked dispassionately at Snake. "Tell me this is worth it."

Snake thrashed his chin from left, to right, to left again. His cheeks were stained with splinters of beaten wood. There was stubble growing in like moss on his jawline. Lara reached out her hand to still him, feeling the stubble along her fingers, her palm. It was like a small forest. "Snake, please."

The older man reached his hand forward and took Vines' shoulder, stabled his gaze. In it, Lara saw something vicious that nauseated her, then made something visceral clench and ache with need.

"Yes," Snake said. "It was worth it."

Vines said nothing between the stitches his hands made war with.

"It's worth all of us," Snake said.

Vines seemed to spot something, and poured another bout of alcohol on the wound.

Snake groaned, his eyes fluttering, his lips curling to reveal sharp enamel, and he laid still, eyes shut.

"It's better like this," Vines said. "He won't remember the worst of it."

Vines dug into another wound adjacent to the first in his thigh with his fingers, dousing both in alcohol.

Snake shook, however unconscious he may have been.

"Will he be alright," Lara asked.

"Yes," Vines said. "Presuming he doesn't get infected, or that there isn't presence of a parasite, which seems unlikely, yes."

Vines threaded a final stitch on the first wound, then began on the second, a much smaller point of entry but big enough to fit a pair of fingers in.

"He didn't cause this. Neither did I," Lara said.

"Yeah. Of course not," Vines said.

"If it wasn't us—"

"Yeah, it would have been someone else."

They said nothing.

"Vines," she said.

"They're going to kill us, aren't they?" Vines asked.

"Yes, I think so." Lara paused, thought about it. Thought about a thousand different questions she'd thought of her life. Thought of the desperation of simply trying to make a fire when those who had loved her, whom she had loved. How difficult it had been. "But only if we let them. We're not victims. We're here because we chose to be. Because some part of us wants to. Do you understand?"

Vines said nothing. Then, after a long pause, he nodded.

"Look," Lara said. "If you had the chance to change everything, how the world worked, how we worked, who you were. Wouldn't you take it? Is it worth it to make sure that we are who we want to be, that there's not a cloud hovering over us?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do. He's laying here right now because he knows. I think I know, too. And so do you."

"Ellie's dead."

"Yes, Malcolm. She is. But you're not."

Lara saw something pained cross through Vines face, reminding her of how close they were in age. How distant the pain had been. It looked on Vines like a child being whipped, or an animal lapping its blood out of its fur. "I'm not." His breath hitched. He stared distantly at the gauze wrapping itself around Snake's thigh. "I'm not."

"You aren't, no." She reached out to him. "What we're doing is bigger than any of us. Bigger than Snake, or Hal, or me. Please."

Vines lack of speech was filled by the forest. It spoke for him, in hushed murmurs, the rustle of rainforest lives lived vicariously, osmosis made into survival. Mammals positioned their bodies for the birds. Birds waited for the insects, and they colluded against the reptiles. Reptiles shifted because of the sun, the sun because of the earth, waiting for its salvation.

"Yes," he said.

"Then you're in? Not in by lack of choice, but really, _really_ in?"

"Yes," he said, "I suppose I am. Do I have a choice?"

Snake's eyelids shimmered open. They pinned Vines with a red-veined intensity that scared the both of them.

"You always have a choice," Snake said.

Then he laid still, and they were quiet again, until they left.


	30. PART ONE: CHAPTER 24

They made their way down the fissure with a minimum of talk. Each felt too hot, too nauseated for much chatter, and Snake's fever was a baking question mark between the two of them. He stood okay; he had insisted an unsafe amount of painkillers to keep the pain at bay so he might make the trek reasonably, and they had washed his pants when the knife had entered his thigh. But the agony was unfathomable for Lara. She could see it in the glints of squinted eyes, or when they moved beyond clay and rock, forcing maneuvers that were cumbersome at the best of times over terrain that was precarious and dangerous over the best of circumstances. At these points, Snake made the most concerted effort she'd ever seen to obscure the pain he was in, but spotting it was still child's play. His lips turned into a grimace. The line of teeth were bared by the awful curl of his thin lips peeling back to reveal the fullness of it. She spotted the limp periodically, when he thought no one could be looking. Lara did not offer him succor, knowing the answer before any question could be asked. Instead, the two of them just walked and observed Snake's pain in his leg like a worsening beacon of poor omen.

When they'd passed a rough approximation of the halfway mark of the cliffside, Snake broke the silence. She wasn't sure if it was for their benefit or his.

"He's tough, you know. Tougher than you'd expect," Snake said.

"Is he?" Malcolm asked. The condescension in his voice could have been accident or carelessness. Lara didn't care. She knew his temperament had seen better days, as had hers. Commentary had no place.

"Yeah," Snake said. "There was a woman a long time ago. She died on him, but he kept going even though no one asked him to. Saved my life, and the lives of who knows how many others in the process. He's…" Snake stopped, found it hard to light a cigarette while still keeping purchase on the thin trail that the cliffside offered. Solid Snake was at the rear, with Malcolm Vines at point. Lara took Vines' lighter and provided the cigarette with its ember, without comment. Snake nodded her thanks. "Dunno. I just have faith in him."

"He could sell you, and me, and her—"

"I am present for this conversation, thank you," Lara said to Vines.

"Down the river," Vines finished.

Snake inhaled into his lungs the flurry of distraction that waited for him at the end his cigarette. "I know," he said. "But he won't."

They walked in silence, further into the deep ravine cutting open their path.

After Snake's leg had been patched, a brief discussion between Lara and Vines took place. Lara had taken a look around, with the prints of Merlose's men's exodus leading only to the conclusion of which direction they'd escaped to. Initially, Vines had proposed the ziplines, but attempting to move the weight of a horse on such a precarious engineering plane would have been impossible, and with only a minor bit of persuasion, Lara had convinced both men of her plan.

"And what if it's a trick," Snake said. He had taken a light dose of a handful of pills Vines had provided to keep him lucid. His brow was sweaty with feverish pain from his leg.

"Then I'm wrong, and we deal with it. But it's the shortest route down, and whatever they want with Hal isn't good news. We need to get him back now—"

"I know," Snake said.

"—And if we don't, it's more than just his life. These tracks," she said, pointing to the hoofprints leading out into the jungle and, a good hundred metres out, crossing the breach the natural divide had created, "lead into wherever they're going."

"I don't understand," Vines said. "Why didn't they bother to cover their tracks like when they attacked us?"

Lara looked, and subsequently pointed, at the substantial pool of blood where Snake had been laying. It drained out into tendrils in the sand. Vines said nothing.

"Lara," Snake said. "There's a chance we're not making it out of this. I need a favour."

Lara looked at Vines, then back to Snake. "Are you sure this is really the place for—"

"Yeah," he said. "I'm not sure we had enough prep to make this work out. This op, New York, the rest of it. We might not come back from this." He took a breath, and the world waited. "If things go sour—"

"They won't," Vines said. His jaw set like steel, and Lara felt the decision they'd made as to his allegiance justify itself.

Snake looked to Vines. "Whatever," Snake said. "look. I want you to take care of Otacon, okay? He's not like the three of us. He doesn't deserve this."

"Some faith in us you have," Vines said. He looked stern, but she caught the trace of smile at the corners of his mouth, and found herself drawn into the familiar ideal of it. She elbowed him in the ribs, and he laughed like a younger man.

Snake smiled. "Yeah, yeah. But I mean it." Snake looked out, beyond the valley the ravine had created, beyond the soil and the green and the world. "He wants to change the world. Make sure he gets the chance, okay?" Snake gestured to his leg. "Probably better for it, anyway."

"Sure," Lara said.

The two of them made eye contact. Lara held it, wondering if this was his Endgame. She thought of where she had seen that blue before, why it felt threatening and familiar at once.

"On one condition," she said.

Snake held the stare, without mirth nor apathy. "Name it," he said.

"You two are on either side of me,_ keeping the same promise_. Okay?"

Snake held her stare for a long time, with Vines gazing out into the infinite forest. Then he took a palm, calloused and warm, and placed it on her shoulder.

"Okay. We'll keep it together, or not at all," Snake said.

Lara watched his face change. His voice dropped a register, his brow steeled itself. Each strand of stubble was razorwire. His voice was the lure of hell's mouth waiting for prey.

Worst of all, she saw a light in his eyes dim.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go.


	31. Thurs, Sept 05

Update tomorrow.

A note on some commentary I've gotten: Honestly, it's just how I compose. That said, these aren't edited (yet), as I'm trying to use the updates as motivation to make sure the work doesn't die and fade off into my memory. Editing is a hole I could get lost in really easy. I'm not using a thesaurus, honest.

That said, I'm flattered someone would think so.

Cheers, see you Friday,

~Jack


	32. PART ONE: CHAPTER 25 p1

_AN: Tiny update. Wanted to keep my word. More tomorrow._

* * *

Crossing the river would have been simple if not for the fire.

The base of the ravine opened into a wide, craggy maw of glittering water and sabotaged footing. Rocks had tumbled out of the ravine's face and crashed below to form a road of effervescent current dividing the road of sharpened stones that made traversal almost impossible. The water's stream was just deep enough to reach their chest, and fast enough that the pull would drag them away in moments. Its width had opened up significantly, and without the slightest hint of rocks large enough for purchase in between either shore.

Worse than the rest, however, was the thirty foot drop the water descended into further along. This was the end of the line. She should have known, but the forest had obscured such a narrow termination point to the gorge's floor. Waterfalls were hardly a surprise, and it barely qualified, but Merlose's men had navigated to the other side of the river regardless of risk.

"Well, this is lovely. We can't make it through that."

"How do you know?" Vines asked.

"I've been in rivers like that. It must have picked up weight further north, but there's no way we could get through that."

"We'll have to try," Snake said.

"No, you won't." When Snake protested, Lara pushed her hand against his chest, feeling real irritation rear again, with a vein of concern as its backbone. "I've been in more than stormy weather. Now, you both listen, right? That's a deathtrap, and Merlose knows it. That's probably why they crossed here and not the endless other possibilities they probably use all about this bit of the country. This is their backyard, not ours." Lara crouched to look about, and plucked a bit of brown sliver from the dry sand. "Good lord, you lot need to trust a woman's instincts once in a while. Here, take a look."

Snake held it up to the light once she'd handed him the minute splinter of wood, looking waterlogged and chewed with moss. "This is probably from a rope with walking slabs, sort of like-"

She pointed to a thick wooden post, or what was left of it, not far off, buried in the soil. It had been severely truncated by a roughshod ax chopping. Its twin, also chopped down, lay across the other side of the river. "A rope ladder, right. That's probably where they mounted the thing for stability, no less. Getting Hal across must have been absurd, using such loosely improvised gear."

"They do it all the time," Vines said. "What the locals use for the ziplines is usually not much more than glorified coat hangers. Sometimes they'll send their babies down them in backpacks, barely tied. There's just no other way to get around out here."

"I've no doubt. Probably worse if they're going into a town or city." Lara stood and looked out across the water. It seemed alluring in the stickiness of the day, but that was a different sort of trap all together. "We've got to get across. The tracks stop here. I've got an idea."

"You just said—" Vines started.

"I bloody well know what I said!" Lara snapped. She closed her eyes, counted, and let air out through gritted teeth. "I'm sorry, please, just help me. I can do this better than either of you, okay? _Please_."

Vines watched her, letting a moment linger, then nodded.

"He needs us," Malcolm said.

Lara smiled in spite of everything.


	33. PART ONE: CHAPTER 25b

She began by crouching down. Each of them on either side of her, Lara took loose her shoes, stuffing her socks into them, and threw them across the river, pitching them like mutant baseballs, where they collided and fell to the sand. Hesitancy encouraged only by the temperature of the water, she took one stride into the stream, feeling muddy soil beneath the jagged stones curl up around her toes, the current snapping at her skin with only a single foot yet immersed. After that, two, then another and another. Soon, she was soaked up to the thighs in water clear enough to drink from and still not halfway across.

"Snake, I'm going to need that rope." She turned to look at him, and he was peering off into the trees lining the offshoots of rockwall they'd left behind.

"I don't like this," he said, taking it from Vines, and making a knot at one end to weight down his toss. She caught it in the first. "Let's be quick about it."

"You couldn't have let one of us go across," Vines said.

Lara caught herself having to shout over the mass of rushing water surrounding her. Her lower half felt clammy, and the suddenness of the temperature change riddled lines of ache up her hips, into her abdomen. She suppressed a cramp with old patience. "I'm the strongest swimmer if something happens."

"How do you-"

Lara glanced over her shoulder, raising a single eyebrow at Vines. He stopped talking.

In a moment, she had fashioned from the rope a sort of lasso, and planted it around her waist before attempting any further. A line had formed, with her at its apex, and the men on the shore, both of their hands on the length of rope yet given. They left her enough slack so she could move forward, but taut enough they could manage to yank her back if it came to that.

The everpresent tug continued its insistence, growing mean. Each step was a careful groping with her toes, feeling delicately forward for sturdy movement, sure not to plant herself in a hidden eddie or snarl beneath the continued flow. The waterline reached her just above her ribs, and had come to its deepest point. The whole of her skin felt as if it had retracted. Her abs began a slight shudder for warmth, then relaxed. The splash of the water was high enough to have thoroughly doused her hair, matting it to her face, ponytail dangling. It struck her she wished she'd put her hair into a braid, but the absurdism flitted away before a moment's passing.

She adjusted her weight, shifting it to the back of one heel, and prepared to throw, when she heard Snake.

"Stop."

Lara turned to look at them both, careful in the motion not to upset the precariousness of her balance.

"What is it?"

One hand tight on Vines' shoulder, he jerked his chin to the direction from which they'd descended. "We're being watched." Lara looked in the direction he indicated and saw nothing, save shrubbery, soil, massive stones and the trail that had led them down the cliff face. A hiding place would have been almost impossible.

"Watched how?" Vines asked.

"I don't know. If they'd doubled around, they must have another way of getting back we don't know about. Probably another patrol sent after Ellie and I were attacked."

Lara turned back to what she was doing, feeling the paranoia, accurate or not, seep into her pores. "Then we'd better get on with it," she said. "Water's a touch cold, anyway."

The rope slipknot that she'd made came loose around her body easily enough, and she slid it over her head shortly before refashioning it into a much smaller circle. It took her a few tosses, but she managed it over the remains of the post along the opposite side of the bank. She gave it a tug, the hardest she could manage, and once satisfied, turned back to the both of them. In order to compensate for the length of rope, they both had to reach the water's edge.

"Let's head off, boys."

"We can't," Snake said.

"Why?"

Snake was paying neither of them any mind. His sight was still scanning the distance for any movement. "Because of my leg," Snake said. To his left, Vines face drained of colour, replaced by moribund understanding.

"I know, you'd need something to hold onto, that was the whole p-"

"No, Lara. The water."

"The water," Vines said, "has parasites. Bacteria."

"I know that, but-"

"Malaria's all but assured," Vines finished for her.

"Are you insane? We're not going to be here but another day. We can't be." Lara tried not to hear the desperation seeping into her voice. She knew what he was going to say before he already did. "But that's not all of it. Is it, Snake?"

"Can we talk about this later?"

"There isn't a bloody later if you don't tell me what's going on!"

Snake said nothing, but Vines impatience and his guilt was enough to break the silence. Vines said "He's already infected, and I've already given him the last of my prophylaxis. We don't have much to begin with, since malaria's not that common out here, and what we do have is at the base."

Lara's skin numbed. From the water or what they were telling her, she wasn't sure. "Wait. That's why were going to go with Ellie, and not just Malcolm. The meds."

Snake just stared off.

"Were you going to tell me? Or even Hal? What exactly was your plan, let us run off without you?"

"It's not like that. I figured maybe I could track them on my own, so all our eggs weren't in one basket."

Lara stood staring at him, mouth slightly agape. The water failed to exist. Words trundled up her throat then fell back down.

"Lara," Vines said, "he's already infected with a parasite. And I'd be shocked if that leg of his wasn't already infected, too. If it's in his blood and he doesn't see treatment inside of forty eight hours, the combination of that plus blood loss could-"

"Shut up," Snake said, voice coming out sudden, with depth like tumbling stones.

It was harder to push aside the broiling than she thought it would be. But she could. And she did. "What is it?"

He began to limp forward, taking the rope from Vines' hands. "You're gonna get your wish. We're definitely not alone. Vines, get over there." Snake took one of the younger man's arms and coiled a rope around it. "Get the hell over there. Lara, get to shore, now!"

She was about to ask him what he knew, or even some vague concept of understanding, when she smelled it. It came in tendrils gurgling past her at first, carried by the wind, then the scent consumed the air.

In moments, the air had been swallowed the acrid stench of gasoline.


	34. PART ONE: CHAPTER 26

_AN: Writing drunk is no way to write. But god, is it fun. More Thursday and Friday, we hope._

* * *

"What is that," Vines said, alarmed, moving towards the water without any of the trepidation they'd had before. There was no point. Snake and Lara were both looking in every direction, heads swiveling to and fro for the sign of the scent. They didn't answer him.

"Lara," Snake said. "Once Vines is across, I'm going to come over. They probably counted on us following their path."

"Right. If we had any guns, I'd say don't fire unless you had to considering the gas, but I don't think that's an issue." She was already hurriedly reaching her arms out to Vines, for encouragement as much as aid. The water felt more insistent. She wasn't sure it was all in her head. "Vines, move it, for god's sake!"

"I'm trying, there's rocks all over the bed, keep sticking in my boots—" He stumbled, tried to right himself at only knee-depth, falling to the side. Lara snatched at his arms, missed, then his ribs. Mercifully, he managed on his own. "Christ, and you're walking this barefoot? Fucking hurts underneath here."

"I've had a touch of practice I'm afraid. Sort of cheating, isn't it?" And she looked to Snake, feeling queerly guilty, angry and worried at once. It felt like someone pushing inside her chest to get out, someone outside pushing down to get in. It wasn't the adrenaline. She knew that well enough. "Snake, once Vines is over—"

"Yeah, yeah," Snake said. Between Lara, the post on her side, and Snake holding tight the rope, Vines was able to navigate close enough to her that he could use her for purchase in otherwise violent waters. While Vines passed her, hesitantly but hurried, Snake said "Once he's shortside, get over there with him. I'll grab the rope, you two can pull me across."

"He's too heavy," Vines said, before he'd even made the trek to the opposite shore.

"It doesn't matter, we'd rip open that leg wound if he so much as grazed one of the rocks underneath here. Even standing on them is hurting my feet," Lara said. Vines had reached sand, and was strongarming his way ashore. "Snake, come on over. I'll take you across, and—"

From the corner of her eye, she spotted the light simmering into life. There was first a thin line of reddish light, then it was a blistering fury, a sprint into the triple digits of fahrenheit. There was an explosion to her left, and to her right the drowning gurgle of water tumbling into forever was dead. The explosion rocked even the stones beneath her, seeming to tremble from the threat of flame. She knew that it was impossible to feel water evaporate so quickly, but Lara could have sworn her skin retreated from the steam further upstream. She smelled gasoline, ammonia, and other snatches of odour she couldn't identify.

"Snake!" She shouted, but her voice sounded as an esper to her own ears. Tinny, and small, and thickly meek. Adrenaline snarled in every vessel and vein. All the aches and pains she had felt accumulate like boulders shattered, and there was only the water, and the heat, and the beating thunder underneath her breasts, her chest, her skin.

The clear river bloomed reddish light around them, seeming to swallow wholesale the miserly blue that the sky had provided. The sound of gunfire had sliced itself through the filtered soundwaves in echoing vagary. Lara yanked the rope as fast as she could without snatching it from his hands. Snake moved like he w as rappelling through the water in reverse slow-motion. Their eyes engaged in nothing else save the other's. Venomous blades of orange licked at her periphery. She paid them no mind. The organ beneath her chest blasted out plasma, hemoglobin, anaemia. It felt like a revelation, sacrosanct. Everything fell into place, and nothing was wrong with the world. Every nerve had a purpose, every pore was opened to its purpose, and the derma of her life had been peeled back to something more real.

Snake stumbled, voice screaming through the cage of his teeth.

Her heart halted, breath evacuated. Another explosion somewhere bloomed. Vines yelled from a million miles away. His head went under for a time, and she could see the agony ripple across his features as his legs gave way beneath him, stolen by the current.

She caught hold of the cloth around his chest and yanked him upright.

Distantly, she heard Vines' voice.

Close enough to press skin, Snake spoke to her through the vacuum of sound. "Get to shore! I've got the rope!"

She looked at him once, held the moment, heard Vines scream again, and turned.

"Lara!" She saw Vines' lips move more than she heard him. When he tried shouting communication, she lost it to the sounds of falling debris and ragged fire. She shouted back, and Vines pointed to her right, away from the waterfall.

As she looked up, she saw the team of them, a dozen or so on either side. Some were running back and forth, but most of the men and women were the same would-be soldiers they'd encountered before. Armed with assault rifles, their firing was hardly concentrated. Most were providing sustained fire in an attempt to ignite the barrels and tanks they were booting over the cliffside.

When she looked to the sky, contrasted against faint blue and bruished clouds, Lara saw flames and guns and hell.


	35. PART ONE: CHAPTER 27

The line on the rope snapped taut, almost yanking it free from her palms. They warmed from the sudden friction, and if not for the water she was sure there would have been an awful burn. She turned back to Snake, who through gritted teeth and fury buried in the wells of his eyes was mounting an ever-forward march towards her, deeper and deeper into the water. As she neared him, she began slowly backing up to the shore, knowing there was nothing that could be done of the burning fuel that was pressing ever closer to igniting. Not far off, she heard the waterfall's steady growl.

Vines was still yelling for her attention, and when Snake had crossed the halfway mark, he gestured with a momentarily free hand to their other companion. She disliked the idea, but realised its importance, and she left Snake to his own devices, not mounting the shoreline but leaving a larger gap between herself and Snake. It made enough of a difference Vines was close enough waded shin-deep in to shout in her ear.

"We have to get out of here, that's—"

"I know, defoliant!" She ignored his incredulity. "A ways back, Snake sustained a wound on his other leg, back of his thigh—"

"He told me!" Vines screamed.

"If we need to, drag him with us, we're not going to get a chance to recover." She looked towards the cliff. She heard the distant snap and boom of small arms fire, but with few attempts to actually shoot at them. Much further upstream, a few of the barrels had managed to leak into the water and ignite, but the river's speed swallowed too much of the fuel for the flames to do more than snap and leap prior to a quick drowning. Lara made no attempt to try and make sense of such senselessness. "Look, you know the terrain better than we do! If there's anything you can do, do it, because they're hunting us down now! They're not going to stop until we're finished!" The line behind her tugged hard, and she tugged back in assurance.

"There might be a shed nearby, if we're close to where I think we are. I've never been this deep into the valley before, but—" Vines expression changed, and she didn't bother to ask.

Lara swung her head around. Snake was gone, and the rope was trailing downstream without a hint of tension.

She yelled first, his name initially, and then repeated it loud enough she could hear herself. The volume of it stung her larynx, as when she inhaled, she was certain she was taking in the fumes of the defoliant that had begun its aquatic saturation. From further south, she spotted a rapid, desperate clawing come up from beneath the water's surface, and then succumb to the pull again. Before her mind had even enough time for logical recognition of what she was seeing, she'd flung herself into the water, hurtling downstream after him.

As she swam, she could feel her feet knock and scrape at the malevolent edges lining the riverbed. A sudden warmth rippled along her shin, hot enough to leap just beyond pleasant, and Lara knew that she'd ripped open her leg on one of the edges. The pain was a rumour her brain refused to spread. Her arms shot out one after another, rotating in turn, stroking the water. Her lips felt torn and tight, dehydration thrown into overdrive from the mossy clay of the river, and in her mouth she could taste a miserable sensation like filthy glass.

In just a short time, she'd caught up with him, but stopping was infinitely worse than she'd imagined it. The breastroke halted by a yank at his shoulder, she tried to right herself in the water and found it reluctant to let go. She didn't know how far they'd traveled, feeling like ten metres, maybe more, but she could no longer touch the riverbed without submerging her face in part. Snake was dazed but conscious, and once she'd gotten hold of him, he was able to bring himself out of the horizontal freefall he'd succumbed to. Lara still found herself none the less doing most of the swimming; his face was drawn with the mark of his wounds.

Hair plastered to her face and capable of resisting the current only in part, Lara allowed her head to surface only to see the river alight with flames rushing ever closer.

"Lara!" Vines was shouting at her further upstream. She was surprised at the space traveled in so short a time. Distantly, she could see the rope, now lifelessly beached. He was just beyond it.

"Here! Malcolm, here!" She waved a free arm and found Snake impossibly heavy. He might have been over a hundred kilos. He was doing everything possible not to sink like a stone or be swept off the termination point of the river, opening into a waterfall loud enough to eat their thoughts. She felt its vast roaring proximity as much as heard it. "We're here!"

On the second attempt, it seemed to take, and Vines spotted them both, shoulders hardly above the waterline. He sprinted over, beginning a clumsy wade into the waterline. "They started igniting it before they threw it off, we've got to get out of here!"

"Here, help me with him! He's bloody heavy!" A quick glance on Lara's part and she could see he was right. North of them and the water was rapidly becoming an inferno. She leveled her gaze only at Vines, who was already waist-deep. The flames were already past their previous point of crossing, and would be at them in moments.

"He's pale!" Vines had one hand wrapped around her forearm, and the other locking onto Snake's. The veins in the young man's neck were like tensionwires suddenly at their breaking point as he pulled with the entirety of his body weight, legs pulling back. Lara was trying just to keep them from being stolen by the undertow.

"I think he nicked himself while we were under, I don't—" It was already there, first an orange threat then an anguished rage flowering red light along the riverbank. A tendril extended brilliant heat behind her, beyond her, between their connected hands, and she screamed, "No!"

"Lara!" Snake made a grasp for her. Vines yelled, but she didn't hear. Lara severed the connection and tumbled backwards, blazing ribbon slipping around her into a gulf. In just a heartbeat, she was surrounded on all sides. The river had become an avenue of red and orange, and she let herself drift away. There was no choice. Already, her skin was tight with the pain of the agonised heat.

Beyond the calm and the adrenaline intoxication, somewhere Lara heard Snake howl her name.

In moments, the waterfall took her, and there was the white of its rapids taking all of her in its absolution. Then, blankness.


End file.
